George Orwell

A satire on totalitarianism in which farm animals overthrow their human owner and set up their own government

Honest and evocative, George Orwell's first novel is an examination of the debasing effect of empire on occupied and occupier. Burmese Days focuses on a handful of Englishmen who meet at the European Club to drink whisky and to alleviate the acute and unspoken loneliness of life in 1920s Burma where Orwell himself served as an imperial policeman during the waning days of British imperialism. One of the men, James Flory, a timber merchant, has grown...

From the Publisher: George Bowling, the hero of this comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is...

Dorothy, the heroine of this novel, performs good works, cultivates good thoughts, and pricks her arm with a pin when a bad thought arises. She then has a series of unexpected and degrading adventures after becoming a victim of amnesia. Though she regains her life as a clergyman's daughter, she has lost her faith.

A novel by the author of 1984 about a man determined to reject middle-class values who finds living in noble poverty more difficult than expected. Gordon Comstock despises the materialism and shallowness of middle-class life-the worship of money, the striving for dull, stuffy respectability. To live up to his ideals, he quits his lucrative position as an advertising copywriter and devotes himself to poetry and other high-minded pursuits. But low-paid...

From the author of 1984, George Orwell narrates the journey of a writer among the down-and-out in two great cities in this sobering, truthful portrayal of poverty and society. Famous for its realistic and unsentimental description of poverty, Down and Out in London and Paris follows the adventures of a penniless British writer who finds himself rapidly descending into the seedy heart of two great European capitals. As a dishwasher in Paris, he describes...

One of the most thought-provoking and vivid essayists of the twentieth century, George Orwell fought the injustices of his time with singular vigour through pen and paper. In this selection of essays, he ranges from reflections on his boyhood schooling and the profession of writing to his views on the Spanish Civil War and British imperialism. The pieces collected here include the relatively unfamiliar and the more celebrated, making it an ideal compilation...

In this bestselling compilation of essays, written in the clear-eyed, uncompromising language for which he is famous, Orwell discusses with vigor such diverse subjects as his boyhood schooling, the Spanish Civil War, Henry Miller, British imperialism, and the profession of writing.

George Orwells' Animal Farm is a 1945 book about a group of animals on a farm, who organize a revolution, and take over from their human owners to run the farm themselves. Adopting the Seven Commandments of Animalism, the animals are, taught to read and write by two young pigs, Snowball, and Napoleon. As time goes on, rivalry between the two develops, which culminates in Snowball being, chased away and Napoleon becoming supreme leader. Growing more...

Inside the Whale is an essay in three parts written by George Orwell in 1940. It is primarily a review of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller with Orwell discoursing more widely over English literature in the 1920s and 1930s. The biblical story of Jonah and the whale is used as a metaphor for accepting experience without seeking to change it, Jonah inside the whale being comfortably protected from the problems of the outside world.