1984 & Animal Farm

George Orwell's novels about the dangers of tyranny, the corruption of the state and the enslavement of the individual are essential reading. In an era of doublespeak, they remain chillingly prophetic. 1984 is a political fiction and dystopian science fiction which sets in Airstrip One (formerly Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation. Animal farm is an allegorical novel that reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union