The Sisterhood: Big Brother is watching. But they won't see her coming.

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The Sisterhood is told from the perspective of Julia, the main female character in 1984. "While on the outside, Julia seems to be the perfect example of what women in Oceania should be – dutiful, useful, subservient, meek – inside she hides a secret," the synopsis reads. "A secret that would lead to her death if discovered. For Julia is part of the underground movement called The Sisterhood, whose main goal is to find members of the Brotherhood, the anti-party vigilante group, and help them to overthrow Big Brother. When Julia thinks she’s found a potential member of the Brotherhood in co-worker Winston Smith, it seems like their goal might finally be in their grasp. It has been wonderful to see the increasing wealth of retellings, especially the diversity in stories from other cultures including Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Korean and Japanese,” she adds. “I believe we are far from a saturation point, if it even exists. There is so much possibility, particularly for diverse retellings, those based on stories that might be lesser known beyond their country but hold as much magic and wonder.” Mark followed this by asking Katherine Bradley about how she built her own world within George Orwell’s 1984: ‘What I really was interested in was this recreation that you have made of the surveillance society, how difficult was it creating this society?’ Bradley worked for many years managing services for people in prisons, mental health hospitals and those without fixed abode. She currently works in education and holds a first-class degree in English literature, in addition to qualifications in creative writing and teaching. As Kate Bradley, she has published two suspense thrillers.

This dazzling novel opens with a gripping premise and then just gets better and better. It is Julia’s story re-imagined from Orwell’s classic 1984, told in her voice. We not only get to hear her side of the story but learn fascinating details of how her nightmare world evolved from ours. The pace increases and the reveals keep coming, and I loved the twists which took Orwell’s vision even further but also brought clarity and explanations. I don’t want to give spoilers but there were so many moments when I went ‘I understand now!’ throughout this novel. At times it’s heart-breakingly sad as we learn how the narrator became Julia, what she endured and ultimately what she lost. Julia is removed from the girlfriend space of 1984 to become a Handmaid’s Tale-style guerilla superspy. Instead of Orwell’s fake Brotherhood there is instead a real Sisterhood of women freedom fighters, and just to let you know Julia means business the novel opens with her thinking about smothering her father to death with a pillow. It’s probably not meant to be funny but it’s pretty funny. “Part of me watches with horror, challenging me: you won’t really do this, will you? Yes, I tell myself. I will.” She’s gonna burn down the patriarchy, just like it was her dad. (The dad is a metaphor.) I'm a massive George Orwell fan, obviously, and 1984 didn't need retelling as a standalone book. It's fabulous, I've read it many times. I'm an English teacher, I teach it as well. But I noticed, on the latest reading, that Julia's a very silent character. She hasn't got a surname, for example. It's not clear what she does for a job. But I did become interested in Julia, and during the novel, it's really clear that everybody knows about this mysterious organization, The Brotherhood. So, you don't have to read 1984 to read The Sisterhood as it's about other people who are also looking for The Brotherhood. Obviously, there are tyrannous regimes around the world at the moment, and I think how they land on women is often very different than how they land on men. So, I thought that was why it might be worth having an exploratory look at how it lands on women, how it lands on this quite a silent character, Julia, and just taking one character and then seeing what she was up to.’ As Willa Cather once observed, “there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Like a prism, we hold a familiar tale up to the light, turn it this way and that, and marvel at it anew. Re-emerging soon Mary Shelley’s Proserpine was a precursor to the feminist reboots of the modern era. Credit: Getty Images

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But nowhere have these kinds of stories been more fully explored than in literature, where the impulse to reinvent old characters and reimagine old plots can be seen across almost every genre and aimed at every kind of readership. Commonly hinged on the big players of the Western canon – classical mythology, European fairytales, Shakespeare, the Bible – a steady stream of retellings have allowed readers to experience familiar tales in new lights. With Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell constructed an unforgettable fictional world, but one riddled with mysteries. Some unanswered questions - does Big Brother really exist? Was Julia working for the Thought Police all along? - feel like strategic ambiguities. Others, such as the operation of the telescreen or details of life in the "prole district", seem more like omissions. Perhaps Orwell decided that they were irrelevant to his mission of explaining the psychology of totalitarianism. Perhaps, because he was desperately ill with tuberculosis, and racing to finish the book between hospitalisations, he simply didn't have the time or energy to plug the gaps. Then again, all novelists have their blind spots and weaknesses, so it's possible that Orwell didn't even register how much he had left unexplained.

A dazzling retelling of the classic dystopian novel, which raises profound questions about how society works, and whether or not woman have political agency. I found it memorable, deeply moving, and at times, terrifying' KATE RHODES Katherine Bradley has delivered a worthy counterpart to George Orwell's 1984 in this chilling, taut book. It's as claustrophobic as it needs to be; particularly frightening as one looks around and sees that we are voluntarily moving towards Orwell's nightmare. It is nothing short of a triumph' MARA TIMON, author of City of Spies Mark Forrest opened the interview by asking Katherine Bradley about how her novel, The Sisterhood, differs from its inspiration, George Orwell’s 1984: ‘There are familiar names in this book, Big Brother, Winston Smith, Ministry of Truth, and Julia, of course, who sits at the centre of this novel. There are many references to Orwell’s 1984. What have you taken? and at what point have you diverged in the story?’In Oceania, whoever you are, Big Brother is always watching you and trust is a luxury that no one has. Julia is the seemingly perfect example of what women in Oceania should be: dutiful, useful, subservient, meek. But Julia hides a secret. A secret that would lead to her death if it is discovered. For Julia is part of the underground movement called The Sisterhood, whose main goal is to find members of The Brotherhood, the anti-Party vigilante group, and help them to overthrow Big Brother. Only then can everyone be truly free. Fast-paced and suspenseful . . . The Sisterhood's greatest gift, however, may be in its message of hope, capable of surmounting even the most formidable of odds and the most uncertain of futures' KATHERINE J. CHEN, author of Joan