Nineteen Eighty-Four

One of a series of fiction titles for schools, this is Orwell’s classic novel in which every aspect of life is controlled by the State. Winston Smith thinks he’s alone in remembering an earlier time when men and women lived by instincts and loved with passion, but then he meets Julia.

This book is far from perfect. Its characters lack depth, its rhetoric is sometimes didactic, its plot (well, half of it anyway) was lifted from Zumyatin’s We, and the lengthy Goldstein treatise shoved into the middle is a flaw which alters the structure of the novel like a scar disfigures a face.

But in the long run, all that does not matter, because George Orwell got it right.