Burmese Days

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In the Burmese provincial town of Kyauktada, the world-weary John Flory - a thirty-something English teak dealer - leads a life of quiet disillusionment, hardly mixing with the natives or the expat community, and deriving some comfort only from his conversations with an Indian friend, Doctor Veraswami, and the attentions of his local mistress. His prospects seem to improve when he meets the orphaned niece of a timber merchant, Elizabeth Lackersteen, who appears to reciprocate his feelings of love - but the arrival on the scene of another suitor, the boorish police officer Verrall, and the scheming of a disgruntled local magistrate threaten to shatter Flory's dreams and put him on a path to tragedy.

Based on the author's own experiences in Burma as a young officer in the Indian Imperial Police, Burmese Days - here presented in the version published in Britain in 1944, which follows the text of its first American edition - is George Orwell's debut novel, invaluable both as a faithful description of life in Burma during the twilight of the British Raj and as an exposé of the failings of colonial rule.

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father was a civil servant. After studying at Eton, he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma for several years, and this inspired his first novel, Burmese Days. After two years in Paris, he returned to England to work as a teacher and then in a bookshop. In 1936 he travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, where he was badly wounded. During the Second World War he worked for the BBC. A prolific journalist and essayist, Orwell wrote some of the most influential books in English literature, including the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four and his political allegory Animal Farm. He died from tuberculosis in 1950.