Narrative Essays
George Orwell
  • Published: 2 July 2009
  • ISBN: 9781846553271
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $45.00

Narrative Essays

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A wonderful selection of Orwell's finest narrative essays.

George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist. From his earliest published article in 1928 to his untimely death in 1950, he produced an extraordinary array of short non-fiction that reflected - and illuminated - the fraught times in which he lived and wrote. 'As soon as he began to write something,' comments George Packer in his foreword to this new two-volume collection, 'it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge - in short, to think - as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent.'

This collection charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites classics such as 'Shooting an Elephant' with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these narrative essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plain-spoken and brilliantly complex.
  • Published: 2 July 2009
  • ISBN: 9781846553271
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $45.00
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About the author

George Orwell

George Orwell (1903–1950) is one of England's most famous writers and social commentators. He is the author of the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is also well known for his essays and journalism, particularly his works covering his travels and his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. His writing is celebrated for its piercing clarity, purpose and wit and his books continue to be bestsellers all over the world.

portrait photo of George Orwell

Also by George Orwell

1984
Penguin Readers Level 7: Nineteen Eighty-Four (ELT Graded Reader)
Penguin Readers Level 3: Animal Farm (ELT Graded Reader)
Fascism and Democracy
Orwell on Freedom
Notes on Nationalism
The Lion and the Unicorn
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Praise for Narrative Essays

Orwell continues to be the benchmark for all would-be essayists because he achieved a perfect balance of clarity of prose and originality of insight. Consequently, he's marvellously readable, an effect he achieved without sacrificing a scrap of his fierce, wintry intelligence. There can be few writers who are as delightful discussing the class system as they are the common toad; Orwell was one of them

Colin Waters, Sunday Herald

The fast track to a core of truth that Orwell's essays take on every page can still make your hair stand on end... With an equally well-chosen (by George Packer) companion volume of Critical Essays, it delivers to newcomers and aficionados a crash course in the arts of close observing, free thinking - and crystalline writing

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Best known for novels 1984 and Animal Farm, Orwell was also a superb essayist, and these two fine collections display his breadth of topic and depth of skill... Unpretentious, intelligent, compassionate and brilliantly insightful

Doug Johnstone, Big Issue

Orwell's sanity and humanity seem especially precious today, when such qualities are in such short supply. How one would love to read him on the subject of our present political pygmies

Daily Telegraph