Signed
Julia
Signed first edition, 2023
Sandra Newman's Julia retells the events of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from the perspective of Julia Worthing, Winston Smith's lover, written with the authorization of the Orwell Estate. Where Orwell's novel centers on Winston's internal collapse under totalitarianism, Newman's version follows Julia through the same world with a sharper, more pragmatic eye, illuminating certain corners of Oceania that the original left unexplored. Published simultaneously in the US and UK in October 2023
Signed copy. Signed by Newman on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, boards. London: Granta Books, 2023. ISBN: 9781783789153. #11283.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Signed copy. Signed by Newman on the title page.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, boards. London: Granta Books, 2023. ISBN: 9781783789153. #11283.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
Julia retells the events of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from the perspective of Julia Worthing, the woman Winston Smith knows only as a fellow rebel and lover. Newman, who wrote the novel with the authorization of the Orwell Estate, keeps the world of Oceania intact. The Ministry of Truth, the Party hierarchy, the telescreens, the rhythms of daily life under surveillance are all there, but Newman shifts the narrative center of gravity entirely. Where Winston experiences Oceania as a man whose inner life is being methodically destroyed, Julia navigates it as a woman who has always understood it differently. She is more pragmatic than Winston, more skilled at survival, and in many respects more clear-eyed about what the Party actually is and what it wants.
Newman's Julia is not the somewhat shallow sensualist of Orwell's original but a fully inhabited character with her own history, her own network of small resistances, and her own understanding of how power operates on women specifically. The novel tracks her life before, during, and after her involvement with Winston, and in doing so illuminates corners of Oceania that Orwell's male-centered narrative left in shadow. The prole districts, the women's hostel, and the texture of female solidarity and its limits under totalitarianism all receive attention they never got in the original.
The novel's limitation is one that no retelling of 1984 can entirely escape. Readers inevitably hold it against the source, and Julia is not trying to replace or subvert Orwell so much as extend and complicate him. On those terms it succeeds, but it means the book is in permanent conversation with a text most readers know far better, which constrains what it can do on its own. Readers who approach it as a companion to 1984 rather than a rival will find it consistently intelligent and, in its portrait of Julia herself, genuinely moving.
Newman's Julia is not the somewhat shallow sensualist of Orwell's original but a fully inhabited character with her own history, her own network of small resistances, and her own understanding of how power operates on women specifically. The novel tracks her life before, during, and after her involvement with Winston, and in doing so illuminates corners of Oceania that Orwell's male-centered narrative left in shadow. The prole districts, the women's hostel, and the texture of female solidarity and its limits under totalitarianism all receive attention they never got in the original.
The novel's limitation is one that no retelling of 1984 can entirely escape. Readers inevitably hold it against the source, and Julia is not trying to replace or subvert Orwell so much as extend and complicate him. On those terms it succeeds, but it means the book is in permanent conversation with a text most readers know far better, which constrains what it can do on its own. Readers who approach it as a companion to 1984 rather than a rival will find it consistently intelligent and, in its portrait of Julia herself, genuinely moving.
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