G, novel by John Berger, first edition in 1972. For this novel, John Berger won both the James Tait Black prize and the Booker Prize.

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.

« The air from the open window cools their bodies and makes them aware of how damp they are, on the front of their stomachs how wet. »

« The process of maturing and, later, of ageing, involves a gradual but increasing withdrawal of oneself from the exterior surface of the body. »

« A waltz is a circle in which ribbons of sentiment rise and fall. The music unties the bows – and ties them again. »