Julia

I was a bit stumped by today’s mono Monday theme, and then realised it was staring me in the face.

It is the latest book club read, the fifth since New Scientist magazine started the book club in the summer. And in a sense it’s a novel layered on another, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. It’s a retelling of that book, but from the perspective not of Winston Smith but of Julia Worthing, so it’s a female rather than male perspective. That’s all I can say for now, I’ve read the first three chapters.

I read Nineteen Eighty Four in my teens, and it was still in the future then. Now of course it’s nearly 40 years on. I shall have to re-read it after reading Sandra Newman’s take. It’s interesting to reflect on the extent to which Orwell’s dystopian nightmare has become the world’s reality, to a greater or lesser degree. The answer might depend on where you live in the world.