Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell. Orwell’s brilliantly bleak future vision of totalitarianism is arguably the greatest of all literary dystopias. Both in its impeccably realised world-building and the prophetic nature of its many ideological concepts, Nineteen Eighty-Four contrived to look back to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s whilst simultaneously predicting with uncanny accuracy the worst excesses of the Cold War-era Soviet Union. A textbook example of a novel you really must read.