From Burma to Big Brother: George Orwell’s best books – ranked!

10 A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935)

Imagination was not George Orwell’s forte. In each novel the protagonist is to some extent an Orwell surrogate doing things that Orwell did in places where Orwell had been. Here, somewhat unconvincingly, the author’s representative is a repressed young woman, Dorothy Hare, who loses her memory, identity and faith. Orwell considered it “tripe” except for the dream-like, polyphonic chapter where Dorothy sleeps rough in Trafalgar Square – a fascinating legacy of his youthful infatuation with James Joyce.

Sample line: “There’s quite enough evil in the world without going about looking for it.”

9 Burmese Days (1934)

An exorcism of sorts. Orwell swerved university to become a colonial policeman in Burma and spent the next few years trying to wash off the stink of his complicity in imperialism. The clammy atmosphere of corruption and guilt is vividly evoked in the story of jaded teak merchant John Flory’s desperate struggle to live honestly. Orwell’s debut is unusually florid but establishes his lifelong interest in disillusioned, self-hating people who mount doomed rebellions against systems they can no longer bear to endorse.

Sample line: “It is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.”

8 Coming Up for Air (1939)

Orwell was a pacifist when he wrote Coming Up for Air, not for want of anti-fascist zeal but because he feared wartime conditions would turn Britain fascist, hence this revealingly fraught view of a world sliding into madness. Orwell’s narrator is George Bowling, an apolitical middle-aged insurance salesman who takes a nostalgic trip to his boyhood home and sees his memories overwritten by progress. Written when Orwell was recuperating in Morocco, longing for England, it’s most interesting when he breaks character and vents.

Sample line: “Fishing is the opposite of war.”

7 The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

When Victor Gollancz published The Road to Wigan Pier through his Left Book Club, he felt moved to apologise to readers for the second half. It is essentially two books. The first is viscerally well-observed and righteously indignant reportage about working-class life in northern England. The second is a polemical demand for a better socialism, free from “crankishness, machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia”, with many hilarious but mean-spirited sideswipes at existing socialists. IPart one still holds up.

Sample line: “We spend our lives in abusing England but grow very angry when we hear a foreigner saying exactly the same things.”

6 Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)

Eric Blair became George Orwell on the cover of his first book, because he thought his memoir of dishwashing in Paris and tramping in England might embarrass his middle-class parents. His expeditions into the demimonde were driven less by necessity than by a compulsion to shed his skin and to find some good material. The book is a little unbalanced (Paris wins) but his tragicomic eye for detail and talent for a provocative aphorism are already apparent, as is his sincere empathy for the downtrodden.

Sample line: “It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.”

5 Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Gordon Comstock is Orwell’s finest comic creation: a furiously misanthropic poet demented by his love-hate relationship with money. Fittingly, Orwell claimed he only wrote the novel because he was in a tight spot, but that undersells the entertainment value of its bitter vigour and fizzing rants against 1930s capitalism, heavily influenced by George Gissing. Comstock is a trailblazing prototype of John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter or Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon and the seething embodiment of Orwell’s fear of failure.

Sample line: “How can you be attractive to a girl when you’ve got no money?”

4 The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (1984)

The majority of Orwell’s output, including many of his most quoted lines, was in the form of hand-to-mouth freelance journalism. There’s no such thing as a definitive collection but this is a great introduction to his extraordinary range, including political essays (Antisemitism in Britain), autobiographical parables (Shooting an Elephant), pioneering cultural studies (Boys’ Weeklies), comedic riffs (Confessions of a Book Reviewer), nature writing (Some Thoughts on the Common Toad), literary criticism (Charles Dickens) and an evergreen take on separating the art from the artist (Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí).

Sample line: “The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.”

3 Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Orwell’s three best books all flowed from the six months he spent fighting for a tiny, impotent Marxist militia in the Spanish civil war, where he discovered that the Stalin-backed communists and Franco’s fascists had more in common than anyone would admit. Homage to Catalonia is a terrific combination of experience and insight: the grubbiness of combat, the proliferation of murderous lies, his narrow escape from the Stalinists with his wife, Eileen. A brave and thrilling book that epitomises Orwell’s determination to tell inconvenient truths.

Sample line: “The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.”

2 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

First sketched out in 1943, its ideas previewed in numerous articles, Orwell’s final book was his career’s summation, pitting everything he loved against everything he hated. With apologies to Yevgeny Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley, it’s the first truly satisfying dystopian novel because it combines political argument and satire with the genre pleasures of spy thrillers and love stories. The novel’s colossal influence on fiction, language and thought obscures its strangeness. Its paradoxes and elisions give Winston Smith’s struggle against Big Brother the texture of a bad dream, where reality is always slipping away.

Sample line: “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”

1 Animal Farm (1945)

With Eileen’s editorial assistance, Orwell wrote one perfect book and it was almost never published because it was deemed politically explosive. Subtitled “A Fairy Story”, Animal Farm is a tight, elegant allegory of the Soviet Union’s journey from revolution to tyranny, yet it can still move a 10-year-old who doesn’t know their Kronstadt from their Kerensky. Whether a scene is funny, sad or shocking, the prose’s deadpan clarity never wavers. It can also be read as a prologue to Nineteen Eighty-Four, with similar ideas about language, memory and travestied ideals. What’s more, an unpublished preface, not seen until 1971, is a classic defence of freedom of expression.

Sample line: “And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him.”