In the Library
Animal Farm
George Orwell, 1945
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 10
- Length
- Length 30k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
This edition is still in copyright in the United States, so it cannot be bought there.
The first button opens the book in the app when it is installed; the badge gets the app.
Still in copyright in the United States: this edition is sold and read outside it.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
Orwell told the same story again in a different key: the fable becomes a nightmare, and the pigs become Big Brother.
£1.99
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
Swift used the same trick two centuries earlier: fantastical creatures that reveal human nature more clearly than realism can.
£1.99
About the book
On a barn wall, a single law is painted that the animals can read by heart, and over the seasons a word is quietly added in the night, then another, until the law means its own opposite. Orwell called this small book a fairy story, and it has the clean cruelty of one. The beasts of Manor Farm rise up, drive out their drunken master, and swear that no creature shall ever again live under the boot, only to watch the pigs who led them swell into the very thing they overthrew. The heartbreak is Boxer, the great cart-horse whose answer to every hardship is that he will work harder, and who is sold to the knacker for a case of whisky the day his strength gives out. By the last page the others crowd to the farmhouse window, looking from pig to man and man to pig, and finding they can no longer tell which is which.