List $29.95

Written by George Orwell - Audio book performed by Simon Prebble - Unabridged Fiction - 9 RETAIL EDITION COMPACT DISCS - 11.5 hours

Publisher, Blackstone Audiobooks (May 2007)

NOTE: Blackstone Audio VALUE / RETAIL EDITIONS are packaged in attractive, compact cardboard boxes, shrink-wrapped, with full-color art. Cassettes or compact discs are stored snuggly inside the re-closable package.

"None can deny its power, its hold on the imaginations of whole generations, nor the power of its admonitions, a power that seems to grow rather than lessen with the passage of time." --Walter Cronkite

The year 1984 has come and gone, yet George Orwell's prophetic nightmare vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. 1984 is still the great modern classic of "Negative Utopia"---a startlingly original and powerful novel that creates an imaginary world.

Orwell depicts a gray world dominated by Big Brother and his vast network of agents suffocating freedom in a totalitarian world in which news is manufactured according to the will of the authorities and in which tepid people live tepid lives by rote. Dissidents are tracked down and subjected to such discipline as turns them into willing tools of their masters.

Winston Smith, the hero with no heroic qualities, longs only for truth and decency. But living in a social system where privacy does not exist and where holders of unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or summarily put to death, he knows there is no hope for him. His brief love affair ends in arrest by the Thought Police and when, after nine months of torture, he is released, Winston makes his final submission of his own accord.

Seldom has a book provided a greater wealth of symbols for its age and for the generations to follow, and seldom have literary symbols been invested with such power.

About the Author: George Orwell (1903 – 1950) was the pen name of an Englishman named Eric Arthur Blair. He was born in Bengal in 1903, educated at Eton, and after service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, returned to Europe to earn his living writing novels and essays. He was essentially a political writer who wrote of his own times, a man of intense feelings and fierce hates. He hated totalitarianism, and served in the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. He was critical of communism but considered himself a Socialist. He hated intellectuals, although he was a literary critic. He hated cant and lying and cruelty in life and in literature. He died at forty-seven of a neglected lung ailment, leaving behind a substantial body of work, a growing reputation for greatness, and the conviction that modern man was inadequate to cope with the demands of history.

About the Performer: Simon Prebble, a British-born performer, is a stage and television actor and veteran narrator of some three hundred audiobooks. As one of AudioFile's "Golden Voices," he has received over twenty Earphones Awards. He lives in New York.