G.

The centenary edition, with a newly commissioned introduction by Jo Hamya. 'Fascinating . . . an extraordinary mixture of historical detail and sexual meditation . . . G. belongs in the tradition of George Eliot, Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer.' New York Times In this luminous novel about a modern Don Juan, Berger relates the story of G., a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the libertine's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their liaisons with him. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi's attempt to unite Italy, the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War and the dramatic first flight across the Alps, G. is a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in the turmoil of history.

John Berger was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative inform and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize-winning novel G, To the Wedding and Here is Where We Meet. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso and the internationally acclaimed Ways of Seeing. His fragmentary prose poem And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984) was translated into nine languages. Towards the end of his life he lived and worked in a small village in the French Alps, the setting for his trilogy Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag). He died in France in 2017.