In a city that might once have been London, in the superpower of Oceania, party bureaucrat Winston Smith attempts to evade the numbing control of Big Brother`s totalitarian government by keeping a journal and entering into an illegal romantic affair. Though the year 1984 has come and gone, the nightmarish vision George Orwell foresaw in 1948 still looms, as civil liberties are curtailed in the name of state security and public opinions are fueled by deliberate misinformation. Orwell`s biographer D.J. Taylor thoroughly annotates this timeless masterwork, and provides an introduction.

"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."—NY Herald Tribune