G

John Berger relates the story of ‘G’, a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the twentieth century.

"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, the tradition of fallible wisdom, rich, nagging and unfinished."  —  The New York Times

With profound compassion, John Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the Don Juan’s success: his essential loneliness, the quiet culmination 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 moments with him.

"Berger is a man of bold and profligate talents and the work which is equally diverse (philosophical, social, moral) is capable of many readings. Superficially - a dangerous trap indeed - it is an almost contemporary retelling of the Don Juan myth... Paradox abounds throughout the novel which Berger annotates with epigrammatic asides... As for the rest, his style is aggressively visual and animated by its inexorable present tense. Ultimately (and ignoring the common reader whom it will defeat) it is an arresting, inordinately vital, impersonal, and remarkable work."  -  Kirkus Reviews

John Berger began his career as a painter in the late 1940s. As well as being a novelist, he was also a broadcaster, philosopher, playwright, art critic, poet and self-styled ‘revolutionary writer’. Berger was the author of acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction, including the seminal Ways of Seeing and the experimental novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972.