“An intriguing reworking of 1984 – in sonnets… Fine indeed; very fine, really, perfectly precise and commanding.”
Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

Illustrated by Martin Rowson.

Nineteen Forty-Eight is a comic verse-novel, audaciously rewriting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four in Pushkin sonnets. Set during the 1948 London Olympics, it offers a radically alternative history of the Cold War, in which Britain has a Labour-Communist coalition government, the Royal Family have fled to Rhodesia and the US threatens to impose an economic blockade on Britain.

Featuring cartoons drawn especially for the book, Nineteen Forty-Eight combines hard-boiled detective-novels and Pushkin sonnets, film-noir and Ealing comedy.

Andy Croft’s books include Red Letter Days, Out of the Old Earth, A Weapon in the Struggle, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler and Comrade Heart. He has written five novels and forty-two books for teenagers, mostly about football. He has edited many anthologies of poetry. His own collections include Ghost Writer, Sticky and Three Men on the Metro (with W.N. Herbert and Paul Summers). Nineteen Forty-eight is his second novel in Pushkin sonnets.

Martin Rowson is a multi award-winning cartoonist whose work appears regularly in The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Mirror, The Morning Star, Tribune and many other publications. His books include graphic adaptations of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and a forthcoming updated version of Gulliver’s Travels. Among his other books are The Limerickiad, The Dog Allusion and Stuff, a memoir of his late parents which was longlisted for the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize.