1984 George Orwell

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is the most influential political novel of the 20th century. Set in a totalitarian superstate under the all-seeing surveillance of Big Brother, it introduced concepts — doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, the Memory Hole, Room 101 — that have become essential to political discourse. Orwell wrote the novel while dying of tuberculosis on the Scottish island of Jura, completing it just months before his death in 1950. It was a warning against both Soviet communism and the surveillance potential of emerging technologies. Sales spike every time a government expands surveillance powers — the book sold a million copies in the first week after the 2013 Snowden revelations.