A beautifully imagined story of love and resistance, by one of the
foremost novelists of our age | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008

In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A’ida. Her insurgent husband Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A’ida’s letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But Suse is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity — an intimate dance, a shared meal — assume for A’ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them. From A to X is a powerful exploration of how humanity affirms itself in struggle: imagining a community which, besieged by economic and military imperialism, finds transcendent hope in the pain and fragility, vulnerability and sorrow of daily existence.

“John Berger has given us an exquisite thing. This is a book of controlled rage sculpted with tools of tenderness and a searing political vision.  Everything he writes about is profound, precise and invoiced: Liberty and the lack of it, hope and the lack of it, power and the lack of it, love and the terrible yearning that takes its place when the loved one has been taken away.” — Arundhati Roy

“From A to X is one of the most tender and poignant books I have read for many years. Its power rests in its economy of means, its account of enduring love surviving oppression. It demonstrates that however foul the forces oppressing us, love and the human spirit are indestructible.” — Harold Pinter

“This little book is magic… It is original and graceful, sustained by a quiet rage.” — Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

Praise for Hold Everything Dear:

Any book by John Berger is an event … admirers will recognize the characteristic blend of sympathy and lucidity, directness of address, human warmth, and cosmopolitan example.” — Times Literary Supplement

“A powerful polemicist and precise poet.” — The Times


“I admire and love John Berger’s books. He writes about what is important, not just interesting. In contemporary English letters, he seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience. He is a wonderful artist and thinker.” — Susan Sontag

Storyteller, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, dramatist and critic, John Berger is one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years. His many books include Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, Here Is Where We Meet, the Booker-prize winning novel G, and, most recently, Hold Everything Dear.