Product Description

Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party; they are drawn towards conspiracy. Yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent – even in the mind. For those with original thoughts they invented Room 101 … Nineteen Eight-Four is George Orwell’s terrifying vision of a totalitarian future in which everything and everyone is slave to a tyrannical regime.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1041 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
His final masterpiece. Enthralling and indispensible for understanding modern history (Timothy Garton Ash )

Right up there among my favourite books … I read it again and again (Margaret Atwood )

More relevant to today than almost any other book that you can think of (Jo Brand )

One of the most shocking novels of the twentieth century (Margaret Drabble )

The book of the twentieth century (Ben Pimlott )

About the Author
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India and was schooled at Eton. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, which provided inspriation for his first novel, Burmese Days. He went on to become a journalist, working for the BBC, Tribune, the Observer and the Manchester Evening News. He is best known for his two novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame. He died in 1950.

Customer Reviews

1984
Once you start reading the first page you can not put this book down. The vivid storytelliTng of a tightly surveilled society with no room for indivdualism is actually really scary. All events of the world are distorted into a perverted edition which serves the government the best and human needs such as love or privacy are forbidden.

This book is still relevant to current times ...
As the first reviewer said, this book is still relevant to current times, riveting and utterly terrifying ...
I'm amazed that there are so few reviews about this classic book. Perhaps people don't believe Big Brother is watching them.

The other relevant classic by Orwell is Animal Farm (ISBN: 0141036133)

Still frightening
First published in 1948, this is still relevant, rivetting and utterly terrifying. Orwell's assessment of how power always corrupts may not be subtle but still feels very real. Despite his use of Ingsoc ("English Socialism") this isn't about party politics, and focuses instead on extremity whether right- or left-wing.

But despite the didactic and polemic purpose of the novel, Orwell never falls into the trap of other political commentators: the message doesn't replace the fiction, but is the fiction. Winston Smith, a kind of everyman, is someone we sympathise and empathise with not only because of his rebellion against the system, but because he retains a sense of humanity that has been overwhelmingly lost. Even his slightly feeble bumbling, and satisfaction in his job is spot on: there are no heroes in 1984.

My only slight quibble is that the love affair between Winston and Julia is so conveniently Mills & Boon: she declares her love and that's it, boom, they're in love... However that isn't of course what Orwell is interested in and so we just have to accept it. Given the time in which it was written there is a kind of subversive sensuality about Julia that was perhaps more shocking than it is now. But the betrayal at the end only has its true impact if we believe they really did love (or at least believe they loved).

But small quibble apart, this is a shockingly relevant book. Worth reading alongside very modern writing such as Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story and (more frivolously, but still importantly) Little Brother for a contemporary discussion of the erosion of civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism.