Going from Mandalay and Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the places where Orwell worked and lived, and the places his books live still. In one of the most intrepid political travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma using the life and work of George Orwell as her compass. When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese intellectual if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, 'Ah, you mean the prophet!'

She was frequently told by Burmese acquaintances that Orwell did not write one book about their country - his first novel, Burmese Days - but in fact he wrote three, the 'trilogy' that included Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It is the place George Orwell's work holds in Burma today, however, that most struck Emma Larkin. When Orwell died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma. Orwell's mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. But Burma's connection to George Orwell is not merely metaphorical it is much deeper and more real. Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she's come to know all too well the many ways this brutal police state can be described as 'Orwellian.' The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has.

George orwell burma