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Christmas 1945 – George Orwell, recently widowed, arrives with his baby son to stay with his friend and writer, Arthur Koestler, at a remote cottage in North Wales.
Orwell has just published Animal Farm and mulls ideas with Koestler for his next novel. Koestler had written the acclaimed novel, Darkness at Noon, about the Stalin show trials and also spent time in a Nazi prison. Both Orwell and Koestler supported the Republican government during the civil war in Spain and were dedicated to democratic Left causes.

Here for the first time are their imagined conversations in wintry Wales, based on true events, which produced one of the 20th Century’s greatest and darkest books, 1984.