Where to start with George Orwell

British novelist, 1903–1950.

Best George Orwell book to start with: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), on 14 of the 16 lists it could have made.

Start with Animal Farm if you’re short on time, and Nineteen Eighty-Four if you aren’t. Animal Farm is a short fable about a farm taken over by its animals, and you can read it in an afternoon. Nineteen Eighty-Four is longer and bleaker, and it’s the one the lists agree on most.

Both are written in the same plain style, so neither is hard going, and both are about how power uses words, which is why people keep going back to them. Nineteen Eighty-Four has stayed on lists in every decade since it came out.

There is no book here to save for later: with only two novels on the index, you can read them both in a week. If you read both, take Animal Farm first. It came out in 1945, four years before Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the shorter book shows you how he argues, so the longer one reads faster.