Author(s): John Berger

Fiction

In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A'ida. Her insurgent husband Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A'ida's letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But Suse is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity - an intimate dance, a shared meal - assume for A'ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them. "From A to X" is a powerful exploration of how humanity affirms itself in struggle: imagining a community which, besieged by economic and military imperialism, finds transcendent hope in the pain and fragility, vulnerability and sorrow of daily existence.