The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

‘The Underground Sea’ brings together texts by John Berger on mineworkers and miners’ strikes. The collection includes new transcripts and image-essay of his rarely seen BBC programme, ‘Germinal’; a new transcript of a moving interview made in 1963 and his essay ‘Miners’. Berger’s ‘Germinal’ places itself in the heart of a Derbyshire mining village, with reflections on the everyday life of a typical pit community. Berger grapples with the politics of witness as he studies the miners’ labour and the wider community shaped in service to this work. Reflecting on their precarity, he goes back to Zola’s text for hope that ‘a new world is germinating underneath the ground. And when it arrives, it will crack open the earth. ‘The Underground Sea is a succinct, urgent collection of writing from Berger’s archive, edited within the political spirit of his work: as a set of action for today.