Fahrenheit 451

With its enduring ability to bewitch and shock, Bradbury’s stirring 1953 novel about book-burning firemen remains one of the unquestionable masterpieces of dystopian fiction.

It was a pleasure to burn. it was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.

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 over fifty years from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.