From A to X: A Story in Letters

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

The New York Times - Leah Hager Cohen

By telling us the letters are not in chronological order, by proposing that their contents may be written in code and by indicating places where the writing is illegible, Berger the author invites us to interact with, to co-create, the text, guessing at the meanings of words and phrases, pondering what might have happened in the interval between letters, and imagining the reasons some were never posted. But "invites" is too mild a term, and "co-create" too academic. What he really does is charge the reader with the responsibility to join in…Berger's insistence on the unique, on the particular, prevents the novel from becoming a polemic. He rails against the blind sweep of oppression while keeping his gaze firmly rooted on the human: on human hands, which A'ida sketches over and over again in her letters, and on human longing, which suffuses this work with pain and beauty.

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, Hold Everything Dear, the Man Booker–longlisted From A to X, and A Seventh Man.