In this gripping reimagining of Orwell’s 1984 Julia, not Winston, is our protagonist. Through precisely told scenes, many of which will be known to readers of Orwell, we are given a female viewpoint on Big Brother’s cruel, claustrophobic world. This novel is packed with risk and thrill, chilling violence and visceral encounters. It will shock readers and stay with them: raising a magnifying lens to our own society and our agency or lack of it.
It was then the change began. It was something in the cadence of that voice, its boom that mixed into the grinding of traffic. It was the same voice that scolded from every wall, from speakers in parks, from radios carried by passers-by, and often from some place unseen, so it seemed to declaim from the sky or murmur from inside one’s head. The inevitable face glared down from the screen and, when she turned away, the same face was repeated along every wall in every direction. It waited at every corner, it flickered on screens in every window, it looked from the newspapers in every hand. Big brother groped into her mind, and when she repulsed him, he grasped at her again and again. At every moment he fumbled for an opening and probed to be let in. He watched and said: I shall squeeze you empty and fill you with myself.
