The Ministry of Truth

The Ministry of Truth is the best book I have read in a long time. Fizzing with ideas yet superbly readable, it takes us though Orwell’s life and the development of twentieth-century utopias and dystopias, to the long afterlife of Orwell’s greatest work, read and misread during the Cold War as simple anti-communist propaganda, then in the 1980s as a failed prophecy, before finally and frighteningly showing it as a warning for our own age. When today 1984 is scrubbed from the internet in China, Russia weaponises lies on social media, and in the West a Trump adviser talks of “alternative facts” on his Inauguration Day, Lynskey's book is both a warning and an exhortation for us all to be stubborn as Orwell was with facts, and like Winston Smith to cling to the belief that 2+2=4.C. J. Sansom

Fascinating . . . Freshly and powerfully argued . . . If you have even the slightest interest in Orwell or in the development of our culture, you should not miss this engrossing, enlightening book.John Carey, The Sunday Times

Everything you wanted to know about 1984 but were too busy misusing the word -Orwellian- to ask.Caitlin Moran