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.