John Berger was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize-winning novel G, To the Wedding and King. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger) and the internationally acclaimed Ways of Seeing. He lives and works in a small village in the French Alps, the setting for his trilogy Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag). His collection of essays The Shape of a Pocket was published in 2001.
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 Its energy and invention remains alive ... Michael Ondaatje, most notably, seems to have learned an awful lot from this book, both in terms of its fractured narrative techniques and the way the fleshy frailty of human characters is so exposed by the technology of the early modern age ... Berger also shares Ondaatje's ability to produce wonderful set pieces -- Sam Jordison Guardian