Here is Where We Meet

Description

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.

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.

'A triumph ... Sad, reflective and peppered with unforgettable images ... it makes us stop and take a breath. It makes us see the world afresh. Makes us do a double-take' Guardian 'Here Is Where We Meet is recognisably of a genre that Berger long ago made his own: the rich amalgam of novel, essay and autobiography. It seems very much a genre of the future. Where a comparable writer, W. G. Sebald, always risked a certain nostalgia in his invention of an erudite, time-travelling persona, Berger reads as if he is reaching for forms as yet not invented' New Statesman 'Berger's clarity, passion and independence put him closer to the heart of things than many a more famous name' Mail on Sunday 'Poetic, philosophical and profound ... One of our best living British writers' Scotland on Sunday