Book excerpt: Booker Prize-winning author John Berger, one of the most widely admired writers of our time, returns us to the captivating play and narrative allure of his previous novels–G. and Pig Earth among them–with a shimmering fiction drawn from chapters of his own life. One hot afternoon in Lisbon, the narrator finds his long-dead mother seated on a park bench. “The dead don’t stay where they are buried,” she tells him. And so begins a remarkable odyssey, told in simple yet gorgeous prose, that carries us from the London Blitz in 1943, to a Polish market, to a Paleolithic cave, to the Ritz Hotel in Madrid. Here Is Where We Meet is a unique literary journey that moves freely through time and space but never loses its foothold in the sensuous present.