Booker Prize-winning author John Berger gives a novel both tragic and joyous, intelligent and erotic. In To the Wedding , a blind Greek peddler tells the story of the wedding between a fellow peddler and his bride in a remarkable series of vivid and telling vignettes. As the book cinematically moves from one character's perspective to another, events and characters move toward the convergence of the wedding--and a haunting dance of love and death.

"A stunning, unclassifiable work by one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers and writers, this book is an inspiring amalgam of letters, poetry, and profound musings on everything from Caravaggio to the nature of time itself. 'Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as though through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ...In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses'. When John Berger wrote this apparently unclassifiable book, it was to become a sensation, translated into nine languages and indelible from the minds of those who read it. This stunning work is a shoebox filled with delicate love letters containing poetry and thoughts on mortality, art, love, and absence, capturing moments in time that hover above Berger's surprising landscapes. From his lyrical description of the works of Caravaggio and profound explorations of death and immigration to the sight of some lilac at dusk in the mountains, this is a beautiful and most intimate response to the world around us"-- Provided by publisher.

Novelist, draughtsman, film-maker, essayist and critic - John Berger is one of the major European intellectuals of our time. For sixty years he has been challenging the way we see the world and how we think about it, in books like Ways of Seeing, Permanent Red, To the Wedding, A Painter of Our Time, Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag and G. But although Berger has always written poetry, often smuggling poems inside books like The Seventh Man and The White Bird, this is the first time his poetry has been collected in English. Collected Poems reflects Berger's longstanding concerns with art and politics, love and war, history and memory, emigration, immigration and the life of the European peasantry. It includes well-known poems like 'The Ladle', 'Village Maternity' and 'Death of La Nan M.' as well over twenty previously unpublished poems. From 'My Coney' (written in 1952 when Berger was just twenty-six) to 'They Are the Last' written in 2008, Berger the poet demonstrates an enduring commitment to the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. These are perfectly framed still-life images, sensual and plain, delicate sketches of hard lives caught between the provisional quality of language and the permanence of things. John Berger's Collected Poems reveals its author to be a major poet of our time.

In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A’ida. Her insurgent lover Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A’ida’sletters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and ofits motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. Butthe area is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroachesfrom outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity—anintimate dance, a shared meal—assume for A’ida a life-affirmingsignificance, acts of resistance against the forces that mightotherwise extinguish them. From A to X is a powerfulexploration of how humanity affirms itself in struggle: imagining acommunity which, besieged by economic and military imperialism, findstranscendent hope in the pain and fragility, vulnerability and sorrowof daily existence.