1984 by George Orwell (1949), published by Secker & Warburg
What's it about? Winston Smith is an everyman for his times working at the Ministry of Truth. He dreams of rebellion and forms a shadowy resistance group called the Brotherhood with his colleague Julia who he has started a relationship with. However, they are arrested and he is subjected to to months of psychological manipulation and torture by the Ministry of Love.
Why should you read it? One of the most acclaimed and significant novels of the 20th Century, 1984 remains a clarion call for our times serving as both a dystopian novel and cautionary tale. Translated into 65 languages and with millions of sales, it is a bona fide classic in literature and has given rise to a raft of language associated with the curtailment of freedoms - Big Brother, Room 101, Thought Police - as well as Orwellian as an adjective.
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Watch, via BBC News: Why George Orwell's 1984 still matters
What the critics say: "For Mr Orwell, the most honest writer alive, hypocrisy is too dreadful for laughter: it feeds his despair. Though the indignation of Nineteen Eighty-Four is singeing, the book does suffer from a division of purpose. Is it an account of present hysteria, is it a satire on propaganda, or a world that sees itself entirely in inhuman terms? Is Mr Orwell saying, not that there is no hope, but that there is no hope for man in the political conception of man?" - V.S. Pritchett, The New Statesman (1949)
Why 1984? Theories abound as to why he chose this title. They range from the centenary of the British socialist organisation the Fabian Society which was founded in 1884 to a reversal of the date in which it was written 1948.
For readers of… The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood; Brave New World, Aldous Huxley; Haruki Murakami's 1Q84.
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