Life: A User’s Manual

How should I live? What is my purpose? Can I find happiness? Ever felt as though life would be simpler if it came with an instruction manual? There are no easy answers to the big questions. And life does not follow a straight path from A to B. Since the beginning of time, people have asked questions about how they should live and, from Ancient Greece to Japan, philosophers have attempted to solve these questions for us. The timeless wisdom that they offer can help us to find our own path. In this insightful, engaging book, renowned existential psychotherapist and philosophical counsellor Antonia Macaro and bestselling philosopher Julian Baggini cover topics such as bereavement, luck, free will and relationships, and guide us through what the greatest thinkers to ever walk the earth have to say on these subjects, from the Stoics to Sartre. Discover advice from the world's greatest thinkers on questions like: Is there a right way to grieve? What is free will? How can we learn from past mistakes? Do we make our own luck?

How should I live? What is my purpose? Can I find happiness? Ever felt as though life would be simpler if it came with an instruction manual? There are no easy answers to the big questions. And life does not follow a straight path from A to B. Since the beginning of time, people have asked questions about how they should live and, from Ancient Greece to Japan, philosophers have attempted to solve these questions for us. The timeless wisdom that they offer can help us to find our own path. In this insightful, engaging book, renowned existential psychotherapist and philosophical counsellor Antonia Macaro and bestselling philosopher Julian Baggini cover topics such as bereavement, luck, free will and relationships, and guide us through what the greatest thinkers to ever walk the earth have to say on these subjects, from the Stoics to Sartre. Discover advice from the world's greatest thinkers on questions like: Is there a right way to grieve? What is free will? How can we learn from past mistakes? Do we make our own luck?

"One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov."-- Boston Globe Structured around a single moment in time -- 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 -- Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life A User's Manual is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world. But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of individual stories; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formula. All are there for the reader to solve.

"One of the great novels of the century. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the late 20th century has produced a novel on the level of Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and Nabokov."-- Boston Globe Structured around a single moment in time -- 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 -- Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life A User's Manual is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world. But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of individual stories; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formula. All are there for the reader to solve.