G. - Paperback – The Tale Trade

G. - Paperback

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by John Berger (Author), Ben Lerner (Introduction by)

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 finest novels, is an inspired exploration of intimacy and loneliness set at the turn of the twentieth century.

Who is G.? The illegitimate son of an Italian candy merchant and a rich young American divorcée, G. is born at the end of the nineteenth century and raised on a farm in England before going on to a Europe that will soon explode in war. G. is a seducer and a cipher, moving from place to place and woman to woman. G. seeks and finds revelation in the shared immediacy of the senses. At the same time, G. is the specter of capitalism's atomized social world. He experiences the persistence of love and the impossibility of love in the world we have been condemned to live in.

What is G.? A historical novel, a coming-of-age novel, a novel of the transformative and terrifying twentieth century, and a novel exploring all the different things the novel can be, full of stories of men and women, but also of poems, essays, and drawings. It is an inquiry into the nature of sexuality, the strangeness of love, and the inescapable demands of solidarity, a novel that seeks to imagine "a new way of living." At the center of it an aviator sets out to fly across the Alps for the first time, while a man and woman, lost in their own world, meet for a rendezvous in a hotel. "Never again," the narrator writes, "will a single story be told as if it were the only one."

G. is an initial, the beginning of something new.

Author Biography

John Berger (1926-2017) was a novelist, painter, poet, and one of the most influential art critics of the last 75 years. His many books include Ways of Seeing, the Booker Prize-winning novel G, A Fortunate Man, the Into Their Labours trilogy, and From A to X.

Ben Lerner is the author of nine books of poetry and prose as well as several collaborations with visual artists. A recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, he is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.

Number of Pages: 384

Dimensions: 1.3 x 7.9 x 5 IN

Publication Date: June 16, 2026