George Orwell left post-war London for Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Jura, to write what became Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was driven by a passionate desire to undermine the enemies of democracy and make plain the dangers of dictatorship, surveillance, doublethink and censorship.

Typing away in his damp bedroom overlooking the garden he established and the sea beyond, he invented Big Brother, Thought Police, Newspeak and Room 101 – and created a masterpiece, widely regarded as the most significant political novel of the 20th century.

Barnhill tells the dramatic story of this crucial period of Orwell's life. Deeply researched, it reveals the private man behind the celebrated public figure – his tempestuous love life, his devotion to his baby son and his declining health as he struggled to deliver his dystopian warning to the world.