G

G Synopsis

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.