#3 in Dystopian
Nineteen Eighty-Four
- 318
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
- Film 1984 +4
- On screen
- Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
- 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction
- NPR Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
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Our view
Orwell’s novel is admired less for comfort than for clarity: its world of surveillance and perpetual war is bleak, coherent and still uncomfortably recognisable. Not every reader would call it enjoyable, and some are uneasy about the way women are spoken of, but the ideas stay with you and the ending lands hard. Best for those who want a book to argue with rather than to relax into.
Worth knowing Orwell wrote much of it on the Scottish island of Jura while seriously ill with tuberculosis; it came out in June 1949 and he died seven months later. Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak and thoughtcrime all entered everyday language from this book. Do not skip the appendix on the principles of Newspeak: it is written in the past tense, which many readers take as a hint that the Party did not last.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian and speculative fiction novel by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final completed book. Thematically, it centres on totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours. Nineteen Eighty-Four has often been regarded as a classic and has been acknowledged for its impact on twentieth-century literature.
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen 5 times — from 1954 to 2023.
- FilmNineteen Eighty-FourIMDb
- Film1984IMDb
- Short film1984IMDb
- Film1984IMDb
- TV filmNineteen Eighty-FourIMDb
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.5 across 9,320 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 98% of the weight and the score stays at 8.5 — the Dystopian average of 7.7 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.6 | 419 | 5% |
| Hardcover | 8.5 | 8.9K | 96% |
Frequently asked
How long is Nineteen Eighty-Four?
It has 318 pages — shorter than 76% of the ranked books in Dystopian.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Dystopian — with scores between 7.1 and 7.9, closest to this book.
