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George Orwell

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. 
 
The year is 1984, and life in Oceania is ruled by the Party. Under the gaze of Big Brother, Winston Smith yearns for intimacy and love - "thought crimes" that, if uncovered, would mean imprisonment, or death. But Winston is not alone in his defiance, and an illicit affair will draw him into the mysterious Brotherhood and the realities of resistance. 
 
Nineteen Eighty-Four has been described as chilling, absorbing, satirical, momentous, prophetic and terrifying. It is all these things, and more. 
 
The Authoritative Text. With an introduction by Robert Harris. 
 
*The jacket of this stunning hardback edition features period artwork by Elizabeth Friedlander, one of Europe's pre-eminent 20th-century graphic designers. Look out for complementary editions of Orwell's essential works Animal Farm and Down and Out in Paris and London.*

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Volume 3 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
No one has ever been as severe as George Orwell himself as to the merits of A Clergyman’s Daughter. He didn’t want this, his second novel, reprinted and he had, he once said, ‘made a muck of it’. Orwell’s disenchantment may in part stem from the way the book was – to use his favourite word for this process – ‘garbled’ during its passage from the typescript to print. 
 
Although it is generally agreed that Orwell did not effectively reconcile the sections of this novel, the development of the narrative was greatly hindered by the effects of censorship. This arose from the publisher’s understandable fears at the time that the book as submitted would lead to actions for libel, defamation and obscenity. In consequence, many pages were ‘toned down’ (again, Orwell’s words), what was specific was made vague and unlocalised, and Dorothy’s crucial loss of memory left unexplained. 
 
The discovery of details of cuts and changes required – most important of which is Mr Warburton’s attempt to rape Dorothy – make it possible to assess A Clergyman's Daughter afresh. Some passages can be restored precisely; whole areas of change can be identified though not restored. As a result, Dorothy’s ‘little odyssey’, her loss of faith and her subsequent resigned acceptance of her lot, can at last be read with a far clearer understanding of what Orwell intended. No one who reads A Clergyman's Daughter can ever regard the plight of those who exist homeless and adrift in a great city in the same way again, especially in the bitter cold of winter. Here Orwell is unforgettable: nowhere else does he write with quite such poignancy.

A Clergyman's Daughter

Volume 9 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
‘It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ This is the opening sentence of the most influential novel of the century, in English or in any of the sixty or more languages which boast a translation. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been described as chilling, absorbing, satirical, momentous, prophetic and terrifying. It is all these things, and more. 
 
Not only does the novel have a ferocious impact, it has also made an irreplaceable contribution to the language – Big Brother, Newspeak, Thought Police, Unperson and Doublethink are just a few words it introduced. 
 
Originally entitled ‘The Last Man in Europe’, Nineteen Eighty-Four also proved to be Orwell’s last book, the physical effort of typing up the final draft leading to his eventual collapse from TB that had dogged him since before the outbreak of the Second World War. He lived long enough to see it become an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic on publication in June 1949. 
 
For this edition the text had been meticulously edited according to Orwell’s wishes, including the re-instatement of Winston Smith’s controversial acceptance of the equation ‘2+2=5’.

Volume 4 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
Originally published in 1936, before Orwell achieved fame, Keep the Aspidistra Flying takes Money as its theme. Gordon Comstock gives up a good job in an advertising agency to become a part-time bookshop assistant at a meagre wage, thereby gaining leisure for writing. However, after some modest success in the world of letters he eventually slides into the abyss, to be rescued by the faithful Rosemary. 
 
Ironically, Gordon’s voyage of discovery leads him back to commercial security, marriage, and the unexpected pleasures of domesticity. But above all he learns of the courage of keeping up appearances despite hardships. The symbol of this is the potted aspidistra: the ugly, stubborn, organic emblem of social and biological survival. 
 
This new edition restores most of the material censored on first publication due to fears of action for libel, defamation and obscenity. Of particular interest are the previously suppressed advertising slogans of the 1930s and, in light of the censorship he experienced, Orwell's ironic choice of surname for Gordon: Comstock.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Volume 8 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
Rejected by such eminent figures as Victor Gollancz and T.S. Eliot (for Faber &amp; Faber), and by Jonathan Cape (influenced by ‘an important official at the Ministry of Information’), Animal Farm was published to great acclaim by Martin Secker &amp; Warburg on 17 August 1945 in an edition of 4,500 copies. Orwell’s immortal satire – ‘contre Stalin’ as himself wrote to his French translator – is as vivid and pungent today as it was on its first publication, and can be read on many levels. Orwell subtitled the book ‘A Fairy Story’, a genre in which he was keenly interested. It combines the poster-paint clarity of fable with the dark and mordant tones of a bitter political allegory. 
 
Animal Farm is indisputably a masterpiece, and places Orwell firmly in the great satirical tradition of Swift and Defoe. This edition incorporates all Orwell’s changes and reproduces his introduction, ‘The Freedom of the press’, which in the event he withdrew, and the preface to the Ukrainian edition, in its complete form, written at the request of the Ukrainian Displaced Persons Organisation in Munich. Also published here for the first time is Orwell’s dramatisation of Animal Farm for BBC Radio (1947).

Animal Farm

Volume 7 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
Coming Up for Air looks back from the sprawl of thirties housing estates, new arterial roads and the domination of the motor car, to an idealised golden England, largely rural and unmechanised when, in the nostalgia of childhood, it was ‘summer. . . always summer’. It looks forward to the destruction wrought by air-raids (though written in 1938–1939, war is expected in 1941) leading to ‘The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. . the rubber truncheons. . the posters with enormous faces’ that will be Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet, despite its sense of loss and its grim foreboding, Coming Up for Air is a very funny book, with a rich sense of the incongruity of life and people, and it is illuminated by Orwell's wry, sardonic wit in which there is not a little self-parody.

Coming Up For Air

Volume 2 of The Complete Works of George Orwell 
 
Burmese Days was first published in the United States, by Harper &amp; Brothers, in October 1934. It was Orwell's second book to be published and his first novel. It draws on his experiences serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (some preliminary sketches survive on Government of Burma paper). he resigned from the Burma Police in autumn 1927 'because he disliked putting people into prison for doing the same things which he should have done in their circumstances'. 
 
Orwell was convinced that publication of his novel in England would be impeded by the India Office because of his exposure of the evils of colonialism - his title, so appropriate to a volume of conventional memoirs, is subtly ironic - but his difficulties proved quite different. Victor Gollancz, though keen to publish Burmese Days, feared action for defamation and libel. 
 
After modification, an English version was brought out in June 1935. Although at the time Orwell considered the changes required to be 'trifling', he later rejected the English edition as 'garbled'. However, as well as forced changes, it does include genuine authorial revisions, something which Orwell had forgotten.

Burmese Days

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