Berg

'A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. . . ' So begins Ann Quin's first novel, a debut 'so staggeringly superior to most you'll never forget it' (The Guardian). Alistair Berg, hair restorer, shares a mistress with his father. He will, he decides, eliminate his rival. After mutilating a ventriloquist's dummy, he finds himself accidentally seduced by the man he needs to kill. Mordant, heady, dark, Berg is Quin's masterpiece, a classic of post-war avant-garde British writing.

Ann Quin (1936-1973) was a British writer from Brighton. She was prominent among a group of British experimental writers of the 1960s, which included B.S. Johnson. Prior to her death in 1973, she published four novels: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969), and Tripticks (1972). A collection of short stories and fragments, The Unmapped Country (edited by Jennifer Hodgson) was published by And Other Stories in 2018.