Julia

London, chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania. It’s 1984 and Julia Worthing works as a mechanic fixing the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. Under the ideology of IngSoc and the rule of the Party and its leader Big Brother, Julia is a model citizen – cheerfully cynical, believing in nothing and caring not at all about politics. She routinely breaks the rules but also collaborates with the regime whenever necessary. Everyone likes Julia. A diligent member of the Junior Anti-Sex League (though she is secretly promiscuous) she knows how to survive in a world of constant surveillance, Thought Police, Newspeak, Doublethink, child spies and the black markets of the prole neighbourhoods. She’s very good at staying alive.

But Julia becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department – a mid-level worker of the Outer Party called Winston Smith – when she sees him locking eyes with a superior from the Inner Party at the Two Minutes Hate. And when one day, finding herself walking toward Winston, she impulsively hands him a note – a potentially suicidal gesture – she comes to realise that she’s losing her grip and can no longer safely navigate her world.

Sandra Newman

Julia is Sandra Newman’s sixth novel and written at the request of George Orwell’s estate to revisit the events of the dystopian classic 1984 through the eyes of Winston Smith’s love interest, Julia. The LA Times called the book “a stunning look into what happens when a person of strength faces the worst in humanity, as well as a perfect specimen of derivative art”. The Financial Times called it “a richly envisaged, frightening dystopia, wholly alive to Orwell’s text”, while Erica Wagner dubbed it a “masterpiece” in The Telegraph.