G.

By: John Berger

Published by New York Review Books, 2026-04-14

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 best novels, is an inspired exploration of intimacy and loneliness set at the turn of the 20th century.

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.