“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.” —Karl Miller, The New York Review of Books
“[Berger’s] triumph . . . G.’s form is reckless—a Cubist collage of dialogues, essays, epigrams, news reports, sheet music, and a few naughty sketches, all of which lets Berger interleave the erotic pursuits of one man with the political pursuits of the masses. A novel this loose has no business working. And yet, it does. It may be the closest any English writer has come to writing a truly non-bourgeois novel.” —Merve Emre, Granta
“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
