In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A'ida. Her insurgent husband Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A'ida’s letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But the town is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity assume for A'ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them.

From A to X is a powerful exploration of how humanity affirms its highest values through struggle. John Berger presents a community which, besieged by economic and military oppression, finds transcendent hope in the pain, fragility, vulnerability and sorrow of daily existence.