Ravaged by years of war and civil conflict, Britain has changed its name to Airstrip One and become part of Oceania – one of the three totalitarian blocks dominating the world – ruled by a mysterious leader called Big Brother who keeps the population in thrall through strict surveillance and brutal police repression. In a society where the individual is suppressed and turned into an “unperson” for not conforming, and where not only personal thought, but also historical record and language itself are constantly being manipulated by the ruling regime, Ministry of Truth worker Winston Smith tries to make sense of the rebellious thoughts and passions that are stirring inside him, and finds himself impotent against the inexorable machine that surrounds him and threatens to crush him at any time.

Arguably the greatest dystopian novel of all time and the most influential post-war work of fiction – which enriched the English language with words such as “Newspeak”, “doublethink” and “thoughtcrime” – Nineteen Eighty-Four is a riveting read and a groundbreaking exploration of mass surveillance, censorship and mind control, which has a deep resonance with the world we live in.

A vast literary reckoning with disappearance, obsession and the violence threaded through modern history.

Set in Santa Teresa on the Mexico US border, this literary crime novel about missing women unfolds across intersecting lives: European academics in pursuit of a reclusive writer, a journalist drawn into the city’s unrest, and a community haunted by a growing list of unsolved murders.

What begins as an intellectual quest gradually reveals a deeper and more disturbing pattern. The killings of girls and women recur with numbing regularity, their investigation fragmented and inconclusive. Around them, careers advance, rivalries flare and history presses forward. The search for meaning becomes inseparable from the search for the dead.

Shifting between continents and decades, the novel resists easy answers. Its scope is immense, yet its power lies in accumulation: detail by detail, case by case, it exposes the quiet machinery that allows brutality to persist.