To the Wedding
Novel , 1995
Bloomsbury
A blind Greek peddler tells the story of the wedding between a fellow peddler and his bride in a remarkable series of vivid and telling vignettes. As the book cinematically moves from one character's perspective to another, events and characters move toward the convergence of the wedding - and a haunting dance of love and death.
‘To The Wedding is one of the greatest and most honest love stories of our time. It does what all great literature can or should do – we become alive in bodies, stories, histories, geographies not our own. We are given a new lease on life through an imaginative act. If I ever pack up my books, this novel will not go into a box, rather I will slip into my overcoat and carry it with me wherever I happen to be.’ Colum McCann
‘No one knows more about the necessity of love than John Berger: what love makes us capable of, and incapable of. This is a book of the most precise humanity. No one who reads it will forget what it makes us understand: every action has its twin, conscionable or unconscionable; every truth, its shadow in the world; everything lost, alive in love.’ Anne Michaels
‘A masterpiece … a novel that will haunt you.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘A great, sad, and tender lyric, a novel that is a vortex of community and compassion that somehow overcomes fate and death. Wherever I live in the world, I know I will have this book with me.’ Michael Ondaatje