*A Painter of Our Time* was John Berger’s first novel — and for a long time, his most controversial.

Framed as the recovered diary of a Hungarian painter living in postwar London, the book moves between art, exile, love, and political commitment. 

On publication in 1958, the book was quietly withdrawn after accusations of communist sympathy, giving it an unusual afterlife in Berger’s career. What remains is a sharp, formally inventive work that already contains the concerns Berger would return to for decades: how artists live, how they see, and how politics enters the private act of making.

The Hungarian cover art on the first hardback editions reinforces the novel’s themes of displacement and cultural inheritance, making this a particularly strong copy for readers interested in art, European modernism, and Berger’s early thinking.