Animal Farm by George Orwell

Paperback: 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Orwell wrote the novel at the end of 1943, but it almost remained unpublished; its savage attack on Stalin, at that time Britain's ally, led to the book being refused by publisher after publisher.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.

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.

Animal Farm was an anti-Soviet satire in a pastoral setting featuring two pigs as its main protagonists. These pigs were said to represent Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. The novel brought Orwell great acclaim and financial rewards.

About the author: George Orwell (1903-1950) was a novelist, essayist and critic best known for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and communism. Orwell died of tuberculosis in a London hospital on 21 January 1950. Although he was just 46 years old at the time of his death, his ideas and opinions have lived on through his work.

Despite Orwell’s disdain for the BBC during his life, a statue of the writer was commissioned by artist Martin Jennings and installed outside the BBC in London. The eight-foot bronze statue, paid for by the George Orwell Memorial Fund, was unveiled in November 2017. An inscription reads, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."