G. - by John Berger (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this Booker Prize-winning classic, a Casanova-esque young man searches for philosophical and sexual fulfillment as he seduces his way across Europe on the eve of World War I.

John Berger's picaresque work, one of the author's best novels, is an inspired exploration of intimacy and loneliness set at the turn of the 20th century.

In this luminous novel about a modern Don Juan, John 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 both 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.

Review Quotes

"What makes the novel worth reading generations later... are the passages of startling analytic and phenomenological insight... The great pleasure that G. offers comes from the wide and sensitive intelligence visible in such passages, the author's unembarrassed earnestness about life's mysteries, qualities so un-English and so seldom seen in English literature they feel vivid and original almost half a century later." -- Anuk Arudpragasam

"A novel which is an essay in the French style, replete with examples, explanations, poems, metaphors, and incidents, many of them occupying paragraphs of their own within a frame of white space, like pictures in a gallery." -- Ben Ratliff, The New York Review of Books


"With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex." -- 1972 Booker Prize Judges

"A fine, humane and challenging book." -- New Republic

"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 New York Times

"G. is a book about sex and sensory experience as a means to think through personal freedom, collective experience, and what form, precisely, the stories we tell ourselves take -- what impact that narrativisation has on the broader sweep of history...I implore you, whole-heartedly, to buy a copy of G." -- Jo Hamya

"For all its high-minded experimentation and self-conscious stylistic quirks, this book remains firmly grounded in the physical world... [G. is] a rich and pleasurable reading experience, as well as an admirably uncompromising, not to mention provocative intellectual challenge." -- Sam Jordison, The Guardian

About the Author

John Berger (1926 - 2017) was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently and moved to a small village in the French Alps.