Excerpt from Julia by Sandra Newman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He reminded Julia of a moving picture she'd seen where an Inner Party man got stranded in Second Agricultural Region and ended up saving the harvest. Only he could see that the trouble with the corn was a tiny insect devouring it from the inside. This thanks to his superior intellect, symbolized by the neat eyeglasses he wore on the end of his nose. When it came time to help with the reaping, though, he folded those eyeglasses, put them in his pocket, and his brute strength was the wonder of the peasants. Girls sighed over him, and the labourers roared with laughter at his down-to-earth jokes. O'Brien was just like that, down to the gold-rimmed specs and sighing girls. Even now, Margaret from Julia's hostel had materialized beside him at Machine 4, laughing at whatever O'Brien had said, her cheeks pink, one hand in her sandy hair. Margaret didn't even work in Fiction, and had no earthly cause to be here. And behind her were Syme and Ampleforth, both of whom worked with her on the tenth floor. All three must have been alerted to O'Brien's presence and come running.

Julia looked away in irritation, for she herself should be chatting up O'Brien – not for love of his blue eyes, but to see if he wanted any home repairs. Most did: the Housing people took forever, and never had parts when they finally came. Julia did home repairs for the challenge – so she said – but almost everyone was kind enough to slip her fifty dollars. And with Inner Party members, it was well worth it, even if they paid nothing. Indeed, it could be better if they paid nothing. That was treating you as a friend. Julia had heard of people getting jobs or flats thanks to friends of just this type.

O'Brien would make the ideal 'friend'. Yet Julia remained on the walkway, her face a mask of dutiful alertness. The thought of approaching the man made her flesh crawl. O'Brien was from Love.

At that moment, all power was cut to the machines. They whirred and slowed with a groan like a great beast sighing ponderously and easing its huge bulk down to the ground. In the silence that followed – a funny-bone silence, a silence like the deafness after a bomb – the whistle blew for the Two Minutes Hate.

Excerpted from Julia by Sandra Newman. Copyright © 2023 by Sandra Newman. Excerpted by permission of Mariner Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.