Fahrenheit 451: TV tie-in edition
The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen.
‘Another indispensable classic’ The Times
‘Ray Bradbury’s gift for storytelling reshaped our culture and expanded our world’ Barack Obama
Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
The classic dystopian novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization’s enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.
Bradbury’s powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which, decades on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.
‘Fahrenheit 451 is the most skilfully drawn of all science fiction’s conformist hells’Kingsley Amis -
‘Bradbury’s is a very great and unusual talent’Christopher Isherwood -
”'Ray Bradbury has a powerful and mysterious imagination which would undoubtedly earn the respect of Edgar Allen Poe” - Guardian
'It is impossible not to admire the vigour of his prose, similes and metaphors constantly cascading from his imagination' Spectator -
'As a science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury has long been streets ahead of anyone else' Daily Telegraph -
”'No other writer uses language with greater originality and zest. he seems to be a American Dylan Thomas - with dsicipline” - Sunday Telegraph