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A New York Times Bestseller

One of Time Magazine's Best 100 English-Language Novels from 1923–2005

A Audie Award Finalist Audie Award Finalist

Blackstone Audio presents a new recording of this immensely popular book.

George Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world dominated by Big Brother and its vast network of agents, including the Thought Police, a world in which news is manufactured according to the authorities’ will and people live tepid lives by rote.

Winston Smith, the hero with no heroic qualities, longs only for truth and decency. But living in a social system in which privacy does not exist and where those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death, he knows there is no hope for him. He knows even as he continues to pursue his forbidden love affair that eventually he will come to destruction.

The year 1984 has come and gone, yet George Orwell’s nightmare vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is still the great modern classic of negative Utopia. It is a prophetic and haunting tale that exposes the worst crimes imaginable: the destruction of freedom and truth.

Editorial Reviews

“Before one has finished reading the nearly bemused first page, it is evident that this is fiction of another order, and presently one makes the distinctly unpleasant discovery that it is not to be satire at all.” —New York Times Book Review

“A profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book…Orwell’s theory of power is developed brilliantly.” —New Yorker

“Orwell’s novel escorts us so quietly, so directly, and so dramatically from our own day to the fate which may be ours in the future, that the experience is a blood-chilling one.” —Saturday Review

“1984 is a remarkable book; as a virtuoso literary performance it has a sustained brilliance that has rarely been matched in other works of its genre…It is as timely as the label on a poison bottle.” —New York Herald Tribune

“Among the seminal texts of the twentieth century, 1984 is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real…The brilliance of the novel is Orwell’s prescience of modern life—the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language—and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks among the most terrifying novels ever written.” —Amazon.com, editorial review

“Orwell’s lean prose, finely honed political discourse, and penetrating images seem as fresh, as menacing, and as disturbingly prophetic as ever. With British equanimity, Simon Prebble accentuates every shade of gray in post-Blitzed-London…Prebble is especially effective at subtly changing pace and giving weight to each character’s most telling moments…1984 remains one of the most powerful and influential masterworks of twentieth-century literature.” —AudioFile