'Perec is serious fun' The Guardian Both an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring memoir, Georges Perec's I Remember is now available in English to UK readers for the first time, with an introduction by David Bellos. In 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with 'I remember', Perec records a stream of individual memories of a childhood in post-war France, while posing wider questions about memory and nostalgia. As playful and puzzling as the best of his novels, I Remember is an ode to life: the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the sometimes trivial, as seen through the eyes of the irreplaceable Georges Perec.

In 1937, five-year-old Colette Rossant arrived in Cairo from Paris with her Egyptian Jewish father and beautiful French mother. When her father dies Colette's flighty mother abandons the little girl to her wealthy grandparents. She soon settles into their luxuriant, food centred lifestyle - spending afternoons in the spice filled kitchen; accompanying her grandmother to the bazaar; and feasting on the delicious Egyptian food. At fifteen Colette is brought back to Paris with her mother, never to see her grandparents again, and only to return to Egypt thirty years later. In this charming, funny, and moving memoir, accompanied by mouth watering recipes, she evokes an Egypt lost, to her and to us, forever. --

Paris, 1947: Colette Rossant returns to Paris after waiting out World War II in Cairo among her father's Egyptian-Jewish relatives. Initially, the City of Light seems gray and forbidding to the teenage Colette, especially after her thrill-seeking mother leaves her in the care of her bitter, malaisé grandmother. Yet Paris will prove the place where Colette awakens to her senses. Taken under the wing of Mademoiselle Georgette, the family chef, she develops a taste and talent for French cooking. The streets of Paris soon become Colette's own as she navigates the outdoor markets and café menus and emerges into her new, gastronomical self. Return to Paris is an extraordinary coming-of-age story that charts the course of Colette's culinary adventures -- replete with expertly crafted recipes and family photographs. An exploration of passion in all its flavor and texture, Colette's memoir will live in the hearts and palates of readers for years to come.

On Stendhal: "The study of human nature, 'the observation of the human heart and its passions, ' was his constant preoccupation. But where could he study the passions better than in himself? Though he lived exuberantly, submitting himself to experience... he went on incessantly writing down everything that happened to him just as it happened. he even led to perform some remarkable experiments upon himself.He laid claim to having been a soldier, a man of fortune, a great lover, a society wit, a diplomat, a traveler, and even, sometimes, a revolutionary conspirator. "Fifty years after his death he becomes one of the demigods of the world's letters, taking his place in the ranks of the great social writers who appeared toward the end of the last century. his manner of life itself has fascinated whole regiments of literary scholars in France, Italy and Germany in the last forty years." -Matthew Josephson, From the Introduction (1946) "Like Josephson's Victor Hugo, it is the best and most comprehensive English study of its subject, a careful collection of material, skillfully assembled and organized...When Freud read Stendhal's memoirs of his childhood and adolescence he called them 'a manifestation of psychological genius.' Stendhal, he saw, had been a Freudian some 70 years before Freud himself."-TIME Magazine (1946)

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