One of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Shaped the World’
‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’
Winston Smith works quietly inside the Ministry of Truth, spending his days rewriting historical records to serve the ever-shifting demands of the Party. Outwardly compliant, he harbours a dangerous private rebellion against a regime that surveils its citizens through omnipresent telescreens and the looming symbolic authority of Big Brother. When Smith begins a clandestine love affair with his colleague Julia, he reaches toward something like hope — only to discover that in a world of absolute obedience, the cost of freedom is devastating. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remains perhaps the single most pervasively influential novel of the twentieth century, its language and ideas having long since escaped the page to shape the way we understand power, truth, and surveillance.
ISBN 13: 9780141187761
Author: George Orwell
