Animal Farm

All animals are equal - but some are more equal than others When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another. 'It is the history of a revolution that went wrong - and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for the perversion of the original doctrine,' wrote Orwell for the first edition of Animal Farm in 1945. Orwell wrote the novel at the end of 1943, but it almost remained unpublished; its savage attack on Stalin, at that time Britain's ally, led to the book being refused by publisher after publisher. Orwell's simple, tragic fable has since become a world-famous classic. This Penguin Modern classics edition includes an introduction by Malcolm Bradbury. You can find many of the sites that inspired the works of George Orwell on a modern map, including the original inspiration for Animal Farm nestling up a quiet East Sussex road. These days known primarily for his disturbing and influential dystopian works, most notably 1984, Orwell was best regarded for most of his career as a journalist and critic and his fiction and many essays, are equally rooted in a very real-world view. Well-travelled Orwell’s writing draws from a life of wide experience, from times of abject poverty living as a tramp on the streets of London, to exploring social deprivation in northern England, to mingling with political elite and fighting in the Spanish Civil War explored in works including Down and Out in Paris and London, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.