Nearly three quarters of a century after 1984 was first published, Sandra Newman offers readers a fresh, feminist take on the dystopian classic. This time the story is told from the perspective of Winston’s lover, Julia, referred to disparagingly in Orwell’s tome as ‘only a rebel from the waist down’. 
1984’s Julia never felt like a real person, but rather an object for Winston to lecture and project his sexual fantasies onto. Her lack of internal life seemed more like an uncritical assumption than an artistic choice. In Newman’s imagination, however, Julia is not stupid but a survivor, looking for human connection as well as sex. She too faces moral conundrums and dreams of a better world, but also understands things that Winston cannot. In other words, she is a full person, and is just one of the many characters into which Newman breathes new life.

Where other modern feminist retellings ring false, Julia consistently enriches Orwell’s original. Through Julia’s eyes we see the manifold ways Party oppression affects women: Inner Party wives mysteriously get vaporised when they reach 30, Party officials regularly commit acts of sexual assault, and women are constantly suspected of ‘sexcrime’. Julia manages to answer the questions that have long plagued female readers without ever feeling on-the-nose or didactic. How might getting changed in front of telescreens affect women’s relationships with their bodies? How might a pregnant woman cope with the idea that the Party could take her baby away?
While Orwell’s novel was something of a political treatise dressed up as fiction, Julia takes a more human look at what it might really be like to live under such a regime. Equal parts hopeful and bleak, Julia is an excellent companion piece to 1984 and a great dystopian novel in its own right. 
Julia is published by Granta on Thursday 19 October.