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This feminist retelling of Orwell’s 1984 brings the original’s philosophies, wit, and horror to modern readers with a strikingly reinvented protagonist.

Julia returns the timelessly relevant world of 1984 to readers’ attentions with a female protagonist more clever and feeling, and perhaps more cynical, than George Orwell’s Winston Smith ever was.

Sandra Newman’s retelling matches closely Orwell’s familiar and disquieting original. Big Brother is the leader of the nation of Oceania, at war with Eastasia (or was it Eurasia?). Telescreens squawking nonstop propaganda constantly observe every move of the Citizens of Airstrip One, formerly London. Where Orwell offered Julia as colleague, lover, and co-conspirator to his antihero, Winston Smith, here Julia Worthing gets a backstory.

She grew up in Semi-Autonomous Zone 5, previously Kent; had her first affair with a Party member at the age of 14; and won a Hero of the Socialist Family badge for denouncing her mother (a more complex story than it immediately sounds). As an adult, Julia works in the Ministry of Truth’s Fiction Department as a mechanic, repairing and maintaining the machines that design plots for the mind-controlling entertainment of the masses. “She was perpetually fascinated by the plot machinery,” Newman writes, but “about the books that were the end result, she knew little and cared less.”

Julia lives a straightforward, self-serving life, outwardly obedient to Party regulations and a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, but is secretly involved in a number of minor sexual affairs, trading in black-market goods for the simple pleasures of real chocolate. Though fond of Winston in some ways, she has no illusions about the possibilities their narrow world allows them and lives mostly at peace within her limits. Newman’s version does not differ from Orwell’s in these particulars, but it does expand Julia considerably, and appealingly, as a character increasingly wrestling with not only the contradictions between lived experience and the Party’s narrative but also questions of right and wrong. “Anything was possible when one was never told the truth.”

Newman (The Country of Ice Cream Star) offers a tragic and harrowing story in lovely, evocative prose, revealing all the ugliness and beautiful possibility of a world hopelessly scarred by hate and manipulation and yet, somehow, still capable of hope. Julia is double-, triple-, and quadruple-crossed: “All was false. It was known to be false, but everyone lied about the lies, until no one knew where the lies began and ended.” Electrically memorable, Julia is as startling and incendiary as 1984 ever was, with dark humor and pathos commenting on perennially timely questions.

This review originally ran in the August 31, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

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