Sunday Telegraph
‘Pig Earth is a relentlessly realist work … Doggedly scrupulous in its detail, its sheer unshowy knowledgeability … Berger is one of the few English writers who can interleave poems and political essays of equivalent intricacy’
New Statesman
Lilac and Flag
As Dickens and Balzac did for their time, so John Berger does for ours, rendering the movement of a people and the passing of a way of life. In Lilac and Flag, the Alpine village of the two earlier volumes of the Into Their Labours trilogy has been forsaken for the mythic city of Troy. Here, amidst shanty-towns, factories, opulent hotels, fading heritages and steadfast dreams, the children and grandchildren of rural peasants pursue meagre livings as best they can. And two young lovers embark upon a passionate, desperate journey of love and survival and find transcending hope both for themselves and for us as their witnesses.
‘Remarkable … Like all great novelists John Berger guides his characters and readers tenderly and with intimate humour’
Michael Ondaatje
‘A magnificent trilogy … Moving in an almost unbearable way’
Anthony Burgess
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos
This book — call it a book of love letter meditating on place, mortality, art, love and absence — is as breathtaking and spare as we have come to expect of John Berger. From his lyrical description of the works of Caravaggio, or the sight of a spray of lilac on a windowsill, to profound explorations of death and immigration, this is a beautiful and intimate response to our century.
‘He handles thoughts the way an artist handles paint. His mind is spattered with colour … His writing has a physical reality’
The Times
‘John Berger is genius invisible. His life’s work is synonymous with the creation of unforgettable living portraits’
Scotsman
Photocopies
In his new book John Berger traces in words moments lived in Europe at the end of the millennium. These moments are not fiction. They happened. As he wrote them Berger sometimes imagined a frieze of ‘photocopies’ arranged side by side, giving future readers a panoramic view of what this moment in history was like when lived. Each ‘photocopy’ is about somebody for whom Berger felt a kind of love, but the book also becomes an unintentional portrait of the author as well.
‘This beautiful book bring non-fiction writing close to drawing — the sort of drawing that both records and investigates … Berger makes you believe in goodness: not an impossible state out of our reach, but a capacity in all of us to do with honesty, not faking. This is a marvelous book’
New Statesman
‘Awe-inspiring … All the writing has a still, insistent beauty … Berger sometimes manages a moment of absolute and truthful emotion, which can be extraordinary’
Observer
To the Wedding
With an introduction by Nadeem Aslam
‘No one knows more about the necessity of love than John Berger: what love makes us capable of, and incapable of. This is a book of the most precise humanity. No one who reads it will forget what it makes us understand: every action has its twin, conscionable or unconscionable; every truth, its shadow in the world; everything lost, alive in love’
Anne Michaels
A mother and father, estranged for years, are travelling across Europe to their daughter’s wedding. Vibrant, beautiful Ninon has fallen in love with the young Italian Gino. She is twenty-three years old — and she is dying of AIDS. As their wedding approaches, the story of Ninon and Gino unfolds. On their wedding day, Ninon will take off her shoes and dance with Gino: they will dance as if they will never tire; as if their happiness is eternal; as if death will never touch them. To the Wedding is a novel of devastating heartache, soaring hope and above all, love that triumphs over death.
‘A great, sad, and tender lyric, a novel that is a vortex of community and compassion that somehow overcomes fate and death’
Michael Ondaatje
‘A wonderful book, one which yields immediate pleasure and promises to stay long in the mind’
Sunday Times
‘The finale, the wedding itself, is a masterpiece … This is a novel that will haunt you’
Sunday Telegraph
‘One of the greatest and most honest love stories of our time’
Colum McCann
Here is Where We Meet
No one appreciates the detail of being alive more than the dead. In Lisbon, a man encounters his mother sitting on a park bench who laughs with the impudence of a schoolgirl. She has been dead for fifteen years. In Krakow market he recognises Ken, his passeur, the most important person in his life between the ages of eleven and seventeen. They last met when Ken was sixty-five — forty years ago. The number of lives that enter any one life is incalculable. In this nomadic and playful book, which travels through fictions across Europe, seemingly disparate stories reveal themselves to be linked, mislaid objects find their place and sensual memories penetrate the present.
‘A triumph … Magical … Peppered with unforgettable images, it makes us stop and take a breath. It makes us see the world afresh’
Guardian
‘Is there anyone today who has done more to change the way we look at art and its relationship to time, landscape and social life than Berger? … He has created a body of work unrivalled in the breadth of forms and genres it spans, its sensuous intelligence, its radical humanism and its ceaseless commitment to carrying out E. M. Forster’s famous injunction: “Only connect”’
Daily Telegraph
About Looking
As a novelist, essayist and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle but powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twenty-first century? What is it about looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and the potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti? In asking these and other questions, Berger alters the vision of everyone who reads his work.
‘I admire and love John Berger’s books. He writes about what is important, not just interesting … A wonderful artist and thinker’
Susan Sontag
‘Berger is a writer one demands to know more about … An intriguing and powerful mind and talent’
New York Times
The Shape of a Pocket
‘The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic order. The people coming together are the reader, me and those the essays are about — Rembrandt, Palaeolithic cave painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient Egyptians, an expert in the loneliness of hotel bedrooms, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening to the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie. I’ve never written a book with a greater sense of urgency’ John Berger