Here is Where We Meet - Tapa dura

'John Berger is genius invisible. His life's work is synonymous with the creation of unforgettable living portraits.' Scotland on Sunday 'Berger's prose homes in on an intense and grainy view of the details of local life, and somehow transposes them into the patterns of a wider world.' Financial Times 'Berger's clarity, passion and independence put him closer to the heart of things than many a more famous name.' Mail on Sunday

No one appreciates the detail of being alive more than the dead. In Lisbon, a city that plays games, a man, John, encounters his mother sitting on a park bench. She laughs with the impudence of a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl. She has been dead fifteen years. In the Islington home of Hubert, his fellow student at art school, John remembers a girl he knew back then. To touch her skin was to sense a horizon, to be transported. He used to call her Oslo In this nomadic book which travels through fictions across Europe, seemingly disparate stories reveal themselves to be linked, mislaid objects find their place. Sensual memories from the past penetrate the present like salt. Cities - Madrid, Krakow, Lisbon, Geneva, London - are mapped as redolent hybrids of old world and new. As it passes frontiers and time-zones, Here is Where We Meet is beautiful, playful and unexpected.