Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell (1903–1950), 1949
★ 4.21 from 5.8m ratings on Goodreads
A clerk who rewrites old newspapers starts a private diary, and every small act of independent thought becomes a crime. A cold, watchful book that moves at a steady pace, its plain voice tightening around you as ordinary actions turn dangerous.
Feels like dread, unease and defiance. About power, freedom and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want a tense, idea-driven story about power and memory, told with grim clarity. Be warned that some readers find stretches slow, the message heavy-handed, and the overall mood bleak.
Why read it
It gives you a sharp vocabulary for surveillance, rewritten history and private thought, and the story stays tense enough to make those ideas felt rather than argued.
A page from the book
The word for disappearance that sounds like household cleaning.
It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word. What readers say
Readers say it is chilling and thought-provoking, with a terrifying vision of control that feels relevant; many are awed, though some find it slow, heavy-handed, or bleak.
George Orwell.Orwell wrote much of the novel on the Scottish island of Jura, in a cold farmhouse, while ill with tuberculosis.
Books that feel like this
More by George Orwell
Animal Farm
George Orwell, 1945
A farm's animals overthrow their farmer and write their own rules — then discover how quickly a good slogan can be edited. A fable about power, in plain prose.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Nineteen Eighty-Four for me?
- You may like it if you want a tense, idea-driven story about power and memory, told with grim clarity. Be warned that some readers find stretches slow, the message heavy-handed, and the overall mood bleak.
- What is Nineteen Eighty-Four like?
- A cold, watchful book that moves at a steady pace, its plain voice tightening around you as ordinary actions turn dangerous. Feels like dread, unease and defiance. About power, freedom and memory.
- What should I read after Nineteen Eighty-Four?
- If you liked Nineteen Eighty-Four, try Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) and Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck).
A taste of the feed
What is lost when nothing is allowed to stand between wanting and having.
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. (The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.
Brave New World · Aldous Huxley
The endearing details that make a monster seem human.
He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
The Handmaid's Tale · Margaret Atwood
What it costs to keep believing in a piece of land you'll never own.
They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head.
Of Mice and Men · John Steinbeck
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