Once in Europa: Book Two of the Into Their Labours Trilogy (Vintage International)

From Booker Prize-winning author John Berger, a luminous collection of interwoven stories, Once in Europa is a portrait of two worlds—a small Alpine village bound to the earth and by tradition, and the restless, future-driven culture that will invade it—at their moment of collision. The instrument of entrapment is love: the passion of a willful shepherd for a shrewd bourgeois housewife; of a vital young woman for a dashing Russian who has come to work in the local factory; of a steadfast son for his aged mother. Lives are lost and hearts are broken, and, always, love is a transcending form of grace. In Once in Europa, it speaks as plainly and as movingly as a remembered language, creating a work of astonishing tenderness.

John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, and lived in a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.