Excerpt from Julia by Sandra Newman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Fiction was a vast and windowless factory floor that took up the first two basement storeys of the Ministry of Truth. The space was dominated by the plot machinery, eight mammoth machines that looked like simple boxes of shining metal. When you opened them up, their guts were a bewildering array of sensors and gears. Only Julia and her colleague Essie knew how to crawl around inside without doing damage. The central mechanism was the kaleidoscope. It had sixteen sets of claws that selected and transported plot elements; hundreds of metal sorts that were grabbed and discarded until a group was found that fit together. This successful pattern was assembled – again by machinery – on a magnetized plate. The plate was dipped into a tray of ink, then swivelled out and was stamped onto a roll of paper. The printed length of paper was cut away. A production manager lifted it free.

The result was a gridded print, jocularly called a 'bingo card', that coded the elements of a story: genre, main characters, major scenes. A Rewrite man had once attempted to explain to Julia how these were interpreted, but to no avail. Even after five years on the floor, to her they might as well have been Eastasian picture-writing.

Now she watched as a production manager snatched a new print off the roll and waved it about to dry the ink. When he was satisfied, he rolled it, inserted it in a green cylinder, and shoved the cylinder into a pneumatic tube. From her vantage point, Julia could watch the cylinder's flight through a tangle of translucent plastic hoses on the ceiling to plop into a bin at the southern end of the room. That was Rewrite, where men and women sat in long rows, muttering into speakwrites, turning bingo cards into novels and stories. But by that stage, no machines were involved and Julia's interest was at an end.

She was perpetually fascinated by the plot machinery, how it worked and the ways it could go wrong. She knew how the inks were formulated, and loved to explain why the blue gave trouble. She knew how the paper was held steady, and what could make it bunch up or crease. She was excruciatingly aware of when a part would soon need replacing, and knew how to submit the order so it wouldn't get knocked back by the Capital Goods Committee. But about the books that were the end result, she knew little and cared less.

Once a Rewrite chap told her he was the same, having formerly been a voracious reader. 'People say if you love sausage, you should never see it being made. It disgusts you after that. That's me and books.' For Julia, this dictum wasn't true of sausage. She'd made and eaten sausage without a second thought. She'd even eaten sausage raw once to win a bet. But it was true of Revolution's Victory: All for Big Brother or War Nurse VII: Larissa.

As she thought this, she realized she'd idly fallen into watching O'Brien. He was working his way around the floor, making impromptu speeches, asking questions, smiling genially at everyone. In the regions far from him, the workers kept their heads down and their faces blank. They were doing their best machine imitation, which in many cases was impressively good to O'Brien, however, all faces turned to him, alive with timid hope, like flowers turning to the sun. Several people had been coaxed from their posts and were gathered by him, listening raptly to whatever he was saying. Of course, an Inner Party member's chit-chat always took precedence over your job.

From Julia's vantage point on the walkway, what was most striking was the physical contrast between O'Brien and his listeners. O'Brien wore jet-black Inner Party overalls of thick American cotton that fit so well they must have been tailored. Everyone else was Outer Party and wore blue rayon overalls, either too tight or comically voluminous. After one wearing, the rayon bagged at the knees; after twenty, the knees grew thick with darning. The dye came out in the wash, so every pair was a slightly different blue, and blotchy where the colour had faded unevenly. O'Brien was tall and powerfully built, while the Fiction people were either painfully scrawny or pot-bellied. They hunched in the permanent cringe of the meek, while O'Brien was a straight-backed, bull-like man. One kept fancying his big hands scarred across the knuckles and his snub nose broken, though in fact he had not a blemish. Then there was his charm: he treated every man like his particular friend, and made every girl feel as if she'd caught his eye. All sham, of course, yet you couldn't help liking him.

Excerpted from Julia by Sandra Newman. Copyright © 2023 by Sandra Newman. Excerpted by permission of Mariner Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.