When G won the 1972 Booker Prize author John Berger donated half of the £5,000 prize money to the Black ­Panthers as a protest against the Booker McConnell corporation’s history of exploitive trading in the Caribbean. His new book (long-listed for the 2008 Man Booker prize) is From A to X (Verso); it takes the form of letters sent to Xavier, an imprisoned insurgent, by A’ida, his lover, who runs a small pharmacy in an unnamed village nearby. Through a gentle accumulation of details from her daily life, A’ida attempts to build for Xavier a vision of hope for a future beyond the prison walls, a future in which Xavier might hold a loaf of bread still hot from the oven or where he might catch a glimpse of a fox down the street. Berger sets the story of Xavier and A’ida in a landscape that has been deliberately shorn of detail: the oppressive regime that has imprisoned Xavier is never identified, nor could I discover on any map the various towns: neither Suse (where Xavier’s prison is said to be located), nor Crocodilopolis (where friends of A’ida and Xavier come under mortar fire), nor Sucrat (the town to which A’ida is forced to move her pharmacy) have precise geographic coordinates. This lack of specificity creates a sense of dislocation in the reader, one that parallels the deracination experienced by A’ida and Xavier themselves; it also allows Berger to speak (through his characters A and X) on behalf of everyone who has been condemned to, and who struggles against, a life of poverty and oppression. The Black Panther Party may be no more, but Berger’s anger—at the many injustices of global capitalism—remains.