Brave New World
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  • Published: 1 January 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099518471
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $19.99

Brave New World

Special 3D Edition

Formats & editions
Paperback
2 Jan 2015
Paperback
1 Jan 2008
Hardback
16 Jul 2024
Hardback
2 Dec 2013
EBook
1 May 2010
Audiobook
6 Oct 2016
Audio CD
18 Aug 2016
Hardback
24 Mar 2022
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Brave New World is still one of the most shocking, unnerving and prophetic novels ever written. Mass-consumerism, individualism, total reliance on technology: it is a future that appears to be here already.

Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here.

INTRODUCED BY MARGARET ATWOOD

Our perfect society achieves peace and stability by dispensing with monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs. You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills. This is the brave new world of Aldous Huxley’s deeply sinister and prophetic novel, a society based on maximum pleasure and complete surveillance – no matter the cost.

'A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it' Margaret Atwood, bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale

'A grave warning... Provoking, stimulating, shocking and dazzling' Observer

'Huxley's great dystopian novel' Guardian

**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
  • Published: 1 January 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099518471
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $19.99
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About the author

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early 20s, but it was his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) – bright, brilliant satires in which Huxley wittily but ruthlessly passed judgement on the shortcomings of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy and an account of his experiences there can be found in Along the Road (1925). The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work Brave New World (published in 1932, this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as Music at Night (1931) and Ends and Means (1937). In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (Time Must Have a Stop,1944, and Island, 1962) and non-fiction (The Perennial Philosophy, 1945; Grey Eminence, 1941; and the account of his first mescaline experience, The Doors of Perception, 1954). Huxley died in California on 22 November 1963.

Also by Aldous Huxley

The Doors of Perception
Brave New World: A Graphic Novel
Psychedelics
Time Must Have a Stop
After Many a Summer
The Genius and the Goddess
Those Barren Leaves
See all

Praise for Brave New World

It is impossible to read Brave New World without being impressed by Huxley's eerie glimpses into the present

New Statesman

The 20th century could be seen as a race between two versions of man-made hell - the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwell's Nineteen Eight-Four, and the hedonistic ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy

Margaret Atwood, Guardian

Aldous Huxley was uncannily prophetic, a more astute guide to the future than any other 20th century novelist ... Nineteen Eighty-Four has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere

JG Ballard

A brilliant tour de force, Brave New World may be read as a grave warning of the pitfalls that await uncontrolled scientific advance. Full of barbed wit and malice-spiked frankness. Provoking, stimulating, shocking and dazzling

Observer

What Aldous Huxley presented as fiction with the human hatcheries of Brave New World has become fact. The consequences are profound and, if we don't get it right, deeply disturbing

John Humphrys, Sunday Times

Huxley's nightmare, set out in Brave New World, his great dystopian novel, was that we would be undone by the things that delight us

Guardian

Such ingenious wit, derisive logic and swiftness of expression, Huxley's resources of sardonic invention have never been more brilliantly displayed

The Times

Not a work for people with tender minds and weak stomachs

J.B. Priestley

The most prophetic book of the 20th century... If you have time for just one book, this would be my top choice.

Yuval Noah Harari
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