Orwell 2026

In 2022, in response to the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in police custody after being arrested for not wearing her hijab, thousands of Iranians – mostly women – took to the streets in protest. Fatemeh Jamalpour had just returned to the country after working in London, and despite the threat of imprisonment or death for her work as a journalist, joined the throngs of people fighting to topple Iran’s religious extremist regime.Across the globe, Nilo Tabrizy, whose parents emigrated from Iran and raised her in Canada, was covering the protests and state violence in Iran, knowing that spotlighting the women on the frontlines and the systemic injustice of the Iranian government meant she would not be able to safely return to Iran in the future.Though they had only met once in person, Nilo and Fatemeh corresponded constantly, often through encrypted platforms in order to protect Fatemeh's privacy and security. As the protests continued to unfold, the sense of sisterhood they shared led them to embark on an effort to document the spirit and legacy of the movement, and the history, geopolitics, and influences that led to this point. At once deeply personal and assiduously reported, For the Sun After Long Nights offers two perspectives on what it means, as a journalist, to cover the stories that are closest to one's heart—both from the frontlines and from afar.A moving exploration of the 2022 women-led protests in Iran, as told through the interwoven stories of two Iranian journalists

A leading Israeli American scholar of the Holocaust explores and explains his native country's intensifying turn toward violence and exclusion.The distinguished historian Omer Bartov was born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv, and served in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become a leading scholar of the German army and the Holocaust, before turning his attention to his native country.In What Went Wrong?, Bartov sketches the tragic transformation of Zionism, a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression, into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism. How is it possible, he asks, that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, an event that gave legitimacy to a national home for the Jews, stands credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes? How do we come to terms with the fact that Israel’s war of destruction is being conducted with the support, laced with denial and indifference, of so many of its Jewish citizens?Tracing the roots of the violent events currently unfolding in Israel and the occupied territories, Bartov tracks his country's moral tribulations and considers the origins of Zionism, the intertwining of Israel’s independence with Palestinian displacement, the politics of the Holocaust, controversies over the term "genocide," and the uncertain future. The result is a searing and urgent critique that addresses today’s debates over Zionism and the future of Israel with rigor and depth.

As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the ‘Indian Empire’, or more simply as the Raj.It was the British Empire’s crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire’, and were guarded by armies garrisoned in forts from the Bab el-Mandeb to the Himalayas.And then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division.Shattered Lands, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches.Its legacies include civil war in Burma and ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan and Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made.Sam Dalrymple’s stunning history is based on deep archival research, previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations, Shattered Lands is vivid, compelling, thought-provoking history at its best.A history of modern South Asia told through five partitions that reshaped it.Endorsements'A sparkling debut by an outstanding young historian' — Peter Frankopan'Remarkable … The prose is vivid, the storytelling cinematic' — The Guardian'This book is a revelation … both original and important' — Mishal Husain'A stunning achievement. Shattered Lands reframes the story of South Asia with rare empathy and elegance, breathing life into the legacies of the partitions that shape a quarter of our world today' — Thant Myint-U'This richly researched, vividly written book tells the story of how a colossal and powerful Empire was broken up into many distinct nation-states… An impressive debut by a gifted and very energetic young writer' — Ramachandra Guha

Stalin's Apostles is a radical new look at the way five people allowed their obsession with Communist ideology to overshadow any sense of morality or decency — or loyalty to their country. Why did these gilded, charming men, blessed with brains, beauty and opportunities, choose to betray their country? Using recently declassified files, Stalin's Apostles explores as never before the treachery of Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, John Cairncross and Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, Anthony Blunt, all radicalised while at Cambridge University in the 1930s. Their clandestine supply of British and US intelligence material gave Stalin an inside track on US and British decision-making until the implosion of the spy ring in May 1951. There was barely a secret, barely a decision made, that Stalin did not know about, thanks to his Cambridge spies and his networks in the United States. The Five became tools in Stalin's imperial scheme, responsible directly and indirectly for the death of thousands of men and women fighting against Soviet domination. Shielded for so long by the British Establishment, four of the five were never prosecuted for their crimes. As Stalin's Apostles reveals, they were exposed as much by their own incompetence as by forensic investigation by the CIA, MI5, or MI6. And in time another dictator emerged as ruthless as Stalin, but with an even greater desire to establish a Russian Empire that would threaten Western democracy. The legacy of the Cambridge Five is not only in the graveyards of Eastern Europe, but at the heart of Putin's Kremlin.

Congo is rich. Swaths of the war-torn African country lack basic infrastructure, and, after many decades of colonial occupation, its people are officially among the poorest in the world. But hidden beneath the soil are vast quantities of cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, tantalum, tungsten, and other treasures. Recently, this veritable periodic table of resources has become extremely valuable because these metals are essential for the global “energy transition”—the plan for wealthy nations to wean themselves off fossil fuels by shifting to sustainable forms of energy, such as solar and wind. The race to electrify the world’s economy has begun, and China has a considerable head start. From Indonesia to South America to Central Africa, Beijing has invested in mines and infrastructure for decades. But the U.S. has begun fighting back with massive investments of its own, as well as sanctions and disruptive tariffs.In this rush for green energy, the world has become utterly reliant on resources unearthed far away and willfully blind to the terrible political, environmental, and social consequences of their extraction. If the Democratic Republic of the Congo possesses such riches, why are its children routinely descending deep into treacherous mines to dig with the most rudimentary of tools, or in some cases their bare hands? Why are Indonesia’s seas and skies being polluted in a rush for battery metals? Why is the Western Sahara, a source for phosphates, still being treated like a colony? Who must pay the price for progress?With unparalleled, original reporting, Nicolas Niarchos reveals how the scramble to control these metals and their production is overturning the world order, just as the global race to drill for oil shaped the twentieth century. Exploring the advent of the lithium-ion battery and tracing the supply chain for its production, Niarchos tells the story both of the people driving these tectonic changes and those whose lives are being upended. He reveals the true, devastating consequences of our best intentions and helps us prepare for an uncertain future. If you have ever used a smartphone or driven an electric vehicle, you are implicated.Epic, shocking, and deeply reported, The Elements of Power tells the story of the war for the global supply of battery metals—essential for the decarbonization of our economies—and the terrible, bloody human cost of this badly misunderstood industry.Endorsements“A tale of rapacious colonialism, Cold War spy games, dazzling technical innovation, big business rivalry, big power geopolitics... Niarchos has produced an unflinching, landmark work on the nature of extractive capitalism.” — Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times best-selling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing

Across twenty years of U.S.-backed government, Afghan women obtained legal degrees, became judges, and set out to transform their country—tackling corruption, challenging traditional gender norms, and reducing horrifying levels of violence against women and children. These educated and powerful women led the mission to build Afghanistan as a modern democracy that respected the rule of law and human rights.Their work, however, posed an existential threat to everything the Taliban believed in—and when the United States withdrew in August 2021, the women judges of Afghanistan faced mortal danger.Escape from Kabul is the extraordinary, never-before-told story of their escape—with the assistance of the International Association of Women Judges—and the shocking fates of those who were unable to flee. Veteran journalist Karen Bartlett had unique access to many of the women involved, including those in exile and the judges still trapped in Afghanistan, as well as women judges from around the world who were vital to the escape effort.Combining real-life drama with searing critique, Escape from Kabul is also an indictment of the West—which abandoned its allies and the cause of women’s rights. The book closes with the judges’ recommendations for their beloved country, in their own words.The extraordinary true story of the Afghan women judges who fought for justice in the courtroom, then fought to escape with their lives, from the bestselling British author.

An indelible, deeply reported human narrative of contemporary China in which the country’s carefully regulated internet offers a lens into the broader national tension between freedom and controlIn the late 1990s, as the world was waking up to the power of the internet, Chinese authorities began constructing a system of online surveillance and censorship that became known as the Great Firewall. But far from being a barren landscape, the online world that sprouted up behind the firewall evolved into a space where Chinese citizens could find previously unimaginable connection and opportunity, teeming with new subcultures and tech innovations.Today, as the country's leadership has intensified its control of public discourse and western headlines reduce the Chinese public to a faceless monolith, journalist Yi-Ling Liu offers an intimate portrait of China’s online ecosystem–and a crucial lens into the on-the-ground reality of life there. In tracing the evolution of the Chinese internet—from its lexicon to its memes to the precise nature of its censorship—she equips readers with a critical tool to assess the past, present, and future of a global power.The Wall Dancers spans the last three decades in China, a period that encapsulates the country’s transformation into both the world’s largest online userbase and one of its most populous authoritarian states—from 1995, when ordinary Chinese people first logged onto the internet, swept up by its emancipatory promise, to the present day, as China closes off its virtual borders. Drawing on years of firsthand reporting, Liu weaves together the stories of individual citizens navigating this transformation: the entrepreneurs, activists, artists, and dreamers striving for freedom and connection within the state’s shifting boundaries. As Liu’s subjects experience the internet’s power as a tool of both control and liberation, they grapple with universal questions of success and authenticity, love and solidarity, faith and resilience.The Wall Dancers is at once an unforgettable work of human storytelling and a vital exploration of what it means to live with dignity and hope within the technological systems that now shape all of our lives.

Andrey Kurkov's war diaries continue – a searing, deeply human portrait of a nation reshaped by war.In this third volume of Andrey Kurkov's war diaries, Ukraine's greatest living writer chronicles the third year of the full-scale invasion from his home in Kyiv and from journeys all over the country – capturing moments of horror, resilience, absurdity and grace with unmatched clarity.Children on a contested border wear hooded bulletproof vests to school; soldiers write haiku; professional clowns go to war; and the mother of a young soldier, killed in battle, uses his compensation money to create a rehabilitation centre for veterans. Roses bloom across Ukraine in quiet tribute to a florist and soldier killed in Avdiivka, remembered by those who once bought his flowers.The Dnipro River seems to slow when the first missiles fall, as though nature itself had paused in shock. In Pokrovsk, 7,500 residents refuse to leave a city that no longer exists – their homes obliterated but their will unbroken. A general's seventeen-year-old pet toad becomes an iconic symbol of defiance. And buried beneath a cherry tree, a murdered writer's final diary is recovered, a haunting echo of a silenced voice.From the home front to the trenches, Kurkov captures the rhythms of survival – the quiet rituals, unlikely joys, unexpected humour and appalling costs – in an intimate and deeply moving record of national endurance. Three Years on Fire is a luminous act of remembrance, rich with unforgettable detail and human spirit, from a writer whose voice stands witness to everything Ukraine has lost – and everything it refuses to give up.The third volume of Kurkov's critically acclaimed, intimate and deeply moving war diaries — a poignant, personal account of life under siege in Ukraine, rich with humanity, dark humour, and unforgettable resilience amidst devastation.Endorsements"Clever, passionate" — The Times"The pieces are flawlessly structured; the tone is devoid of self-pity … Yet saturating the book is a note of savage black comedy, the farce of a world made weird by unimaginable violence" — Spectator"Uplifting and utterly defiant" — Daily Express"No-one with the slightest interest in this war, or the nation on which it is being waged, should fail to read Andrey Kurkov" — Daily Mail"Andrey Kurkov [is] one of the most articulate ambassadors to the West for the situation in his homeland," — Sam Leith, Spectator"Immediate and important … From the grim incredulity at Russians massing on the border to the displacement of millions of people, this is an insider's account of how an ordinary life became extraordinary. It is also about survival, hope and humanity," — Helen Davies, The Times"Ukraine's greatest novelist is fighting for his country," — Giles Harvey, New York Times

Rome, 1953. David is young, handsome, charismatic, and sworn to celibacy. He is freshly ordained, and about to return to England to begin life as a priest. Devotion to God is all he’s ever known, and all he thinks he ever will.In London, Margaret is entangled in an impossible love affair. Increasingly drawn to the Church, she sets out to join the new revolutions of sex and faith.Decades later, she is being cared for by her grandson, who has just discovered the strange truth of his family history.An exquisite slow-burn forbidden love story, laced with passion and faith. Stephanie Sy-Quia’s A Private Man is a stunning story of devotion and sacrifice, and of the consequences of our actions that ripple throughout generations.

A young girl spends her days on a double-decker bus. A bride-to-be prays to St Valentine's bones. Bouquets are found all over a museum. Teenagers gather to dissect a human body. Brimming with compassion and thrumming with energy, these stories are scrupulous in their attention to detail, epic in their scope. In this bravura debut collection, Liadan Ni Chuinn delivers a consummate blend of the personal and the political.

One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone, presumed drowned. She is ten years old.In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless sexual adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory.

A vivid, moving, and beautifully crafted novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a close-knit community and a fraying family, of a father's expectations and a son's desires.Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted.EndorsementsBooker Prize–winning author

Ezeani is no ordinary child. He sees things others don’t.Despite the burden of these visions, his precocious nature blossoms into genius and Ezeani grows up to be a gifted mathematician and physicist. When he leaves Nigeria and his adoring family behind to study at Cornell in the US, he remains haunted by his most persistent vision, Anyanwu, the Sun God. While Ezeani is adjusting to his new life in America, Anyanwu’s presence takes on an increasingly sinister and malevolent form — and chaos reigns. It’s enough to make anyone lose their grip on reality.The Comfort of Distant Stars is a bold coming-of-age tale blending physics, philosophy and Igbo cosmology, examining how we understand our place in the universe. It ponders the big questions we all ask ourselves about the nature of time and of being — ultimately revealing the startling vulnerability of the human mind.EndorsementsA Financial Times best new debut.'Echeruo’s dazzling bildungsroman throws out ideas like firecrackers. . . It’s quite a ride' — Financial Times'Echeruo proves a hypnotic, mind-bending talent in this extraordinary novel' — Afua Hirsch'A breathtaking meditation on time and memory' — Stephen Buoro

Moving from Pakistan’s sophisticated cities to its most rural farmlands, This Is Where the Serpent Lives captures the extraordinary proximity of extreme wealth to extreme poverty in a land where fate is determined by class and social station.Daniyal Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives paints a powerful portrait of contemporary feudal Pakistan, and a farm on which the destinies of a dozen unforgettable characters are linked through violence and love, resilience and tragedy. From Afra, who rose from abject poverty to the role of trusted servant to an affluent gangster; to Saqib, an errand boy who is eventually trusted to lead his boss’s new farming venture, where he becomes determined to rise above his rank by any means necessary. Saqib’s boss, the wealthy landowner Hisham, reminisces about meeting his wife while she was dating his brother, while Gazala, a young teacher, falls for Saqib and his bold promises for their future before learning about his plans to skim money from the farm’s profits.In matters of both business and the heart, Mueenuddin’s characters struggle to choose between the paths that are moral and the paths that will allow them to survive the systems of caste, capital, and social power that so tightly grip their country.Intimate and epic, elegiac and profoundly moving, Mueenuddin’s This Is Where the Serpent Lives is a tour de force destined to become a classic of contemporary literature.EndorsementsA stunning first novel from universally acclaimed Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose debut short story collection won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend, Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Haunted by Kafka (there are echoes of “The Judgement” and “A Hunger Artist”), but utterly contemporary, Lerner combines trenchant insight with lyric mystery.Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.Endorsements“Most talented writer of his generation.” A lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store—or to erase—our memories. — The New York Times

Any moment now, we would grow up, and we would become them, waking late and hungry and with a job that had no nameOn a desolate, sinking island, a group of children witness their mothers living lives of cruelty and servitude.Bought and sold by Amma, the sadistic madam who was once herself sold into slavery, the women have learned to accept their fate. Yet their children weave fantastic tales of escape, imagining that someday they will leave the island and enjoy a life of freedom.When Kusum Khan, a young, educated woman from the city, is forcibly brought to the island, she too is subjected to Amma’s violent induction. Yet Kusum refuses to yield, and soon the collective complacency of her fellow prisoners turns into a ferocity and defiance. Together, they begin a rebellion that will upend their island, their world and the very order of things.An earth-shattering drama of resistance and female power, Uprising gives voice to the silenced through the story of a revolution no one saw coming.