1 1

G.

G.

by John Berger, introduction by Ben Lerner

$18.95
$18.95
Available as E-Book British & Irish Literature Literature in English
Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when this book and other new titles are available for purchase:

The July 2026 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

Who is G.? The illegitimate son of an Italian candy merchant and a rich young American divorcée, G. is born at the end of the nineteenth century and raised on a farm in England before going on to a Europe that will soon explode in war. G. is a seducer and a cipher, moving from place to place and woman to woman. G. seeks and finds revelation in the shared immediacy of the senses. At the same time, G. is the specter of capitalism’s atomized social world. He experiences the persistence of love and the impossibility of love in the world we have been condemned to live in.

What is G.? A historical novel, a coming-of-age novel, a novel of the transformative and terrifying twentieth century, and a novel exploring all the different things the novel can be, full of stories of men and women, but also of poems, essays, and drawings. It is an inquiry into the nature of sexuality, the strangeness of love, and the inescapable demands of solidarity, a novel that seeks to imagine “a new way of living.” At the center of it an aviator sets out to fly across the Alps for the first time, while a man and woman, lost in their own world, meet for a rendezvous in a hotel. “Never again,” the narrator writes, “will a single story be told as if it were the only one.”

G. is an initial, the beginning of something new.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230557
Pages: 384
Publication Date:

Praise

What makes the novel worth reading generations later… are the passages of startling analytic and phenomenological insight… The great pleasure that G. offers comes from the wide and sensitive intelligence visible in such passages, the author’s unembarrassed earnestness about life’s mysteries, qualities so un-English and so seldom seen in English literature they feel vivid and original almost half a century later.
—Anuk Arudpragasam

A novel which is an essay in the French style, replete with examples, explanations, poems, metaphors, and incidents, many of them occupying paragraphs of their own within a frame of white space, like pictures in a gallery.
—Ben Ratliff, The New York Review of Books

With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex.
—1972 Booker Prize Judges

A fine, humane and challenging book.
—New Republic

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.
—The New York Times

G. is a book about sex and sensory experience as a means to think through personal freedom, collective experience, and what form, precisely, the stories we tell ourselves take — what impact that narrativisation has on the broader sweep of history…I implore you, whole-heartedly, to buy a copy of G.
—Jo Hamya

For all its high-minded experimentation and self-conscious stylistic quirks, this book remains firmly grounded in the physical world… [G. is] a rich and pleasurable reading experience, as well as an admirably uncompromising, not to mention provocative intellectual challenge.
—Sam Jordison, The Guardian

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it