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Book Cover for: King: A Street Story, John Berger

King: A Street Story

John Berger

Reader Score

75%

75% of readers

recommend this book

With the poetic acuity that renders his work timeless, Booker Prize-winning author John Berger brings us a twenty-four hour chronicle of homelessness. Beside a highway, in a wasteland furnished with smashed trucks and broken washing machines, lives a homeless community of once-hopeful individuals, now abandoned by the twentieth century.

King, our narrator, is the guardian of a homeless couple, stealing meat from the butcher and sharing the warmth of his flesh. His canine sensibility affords him both amnesty from human hardship and rare insight into his companions' lives. Through his senses we see--clearly and unsentimentally--the dignity and strength that can survive within chaos and pain.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Vintage
  • Publish Date: Nov 14th, 2000
  • Pages: 208
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.94in - 5.17in - 0.62in - 0.52lb
  • EAN: 9780375705342
  • Categories: LiteraryVisionary & MetaphysicalPsychological

About the Author

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.

Praise for this book

"King delights in the power of the imagination to transform small enjoyments into a full life."--The Baltimore Sun

"King is relentlessly unsentimental and heartbreaking."--Los Angeles Times

"Berger's ambition to explore his political and moral beliefs through fiction has never been more fully realized."--Times Literary Supplement

"Berger seamlessly melds literature and conscience here." --