Fahrenheit 451
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- 7,49 €
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- 7,49 €
Publisher Description
The hauntingly prophetic classic novel.
Over 1 million copies sold in the UK.
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 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, forty years on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.
Reviews
‘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
About the author
One of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of all time, Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920. He moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1934. Since his first story appeared in Weird Tales when he was twenty years old, he published some 500 short stories, novels, plays, scripts and poems. Among his many famous works are Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles. Ray Bradbury died in 2012 at the age of 91.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Imagine a future where books are outlawed and burned by firemen, who gleefully incinerate all traces of the written word. Guy Montag is such a man, and his emotional journey from destroyer to defender of books is the beating heart of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian classic—a novel that remains provocative today. Though Fahrenheit 451’s forecast for technology—robotic dogs, seashell earbuds—is quaintly of its time, its vision of a society derailed by shortened attention spans and political apathy is downright prophetic. But futuristic predictions aren’t really the point. Bradbury’s cinematic imagery and lyrical bursts of metaphor seek to articulate the aching loneliness of a world without literature to spark our intellect and soul.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After years of working as a fireman one who burns books and enjoys his work Guy Montag meets a young girl who makes him question his profession and the values of the society in which he lives. Stephen Hoye's narration is perfectly matched to the subject matter: his tone is low and ominous, and his cadence shifts with the prose to ratchet up tension and suspense. He produces spot-on voices, and his versions of the gruff Captain Beatty, the playful Clarisse, and the fearful professor Faber are especially impressive. A Ballantine paperback.
