Orwell's Roses

**Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

An exhilarating romp through Orwell s life and times and also through the life and times of roses. Margaret Atwood

A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker. Claire Messud, Harper's

Nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way. Vogue

A lush exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded by his passion for the natural world

In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses. So be-gins Rebecca Solnit s new book, a reflection on George Orwell s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power.

Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit s account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell s life journeys through his writing and his actions from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.

Through Solnit s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers are drawn onward from Orwell s own work as a writer and gardener to encounter photographer Tina Modotti s roses and her politics, agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid s examination of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes Solnit s portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.

NAMED A "MUST-READ" BOOK OF 2021 BY TIME

“I loved this book, and so will many. . . [Orwell] is re-envisioned as a joyous, hopeful, life-loving, toad-appreciating, baby-cherishing dad, but especially as an avid and energetic gardener . . . an exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.”
—Margaret Atwood

“[A] tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation . . . the great pleasure of reading [Solnit] is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections . . . a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker . . . movingly, [Solnit]  takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his pollical novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things.”
—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine

“[A] wide-ranging yet disciplined sequence of essays on the importance of joy in Orwell’s concept of freedom . . . Solnit seeks to show us that Orwell was [...] capable of taking great joy in small things . . . and such pleasure was intrinsic to his political vision . . . like Orwell as essayist, Solnit  deploys the full human instrument in service of her curiosity . . . She just creates a frame large enough to contain both revolutionary brilliance and unwitting reactionary associations in the same person—large enough to contain life’s contradictions in a way that only the essay, that humble literary mouthpiece, can.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“[A] far-reaching meditation on Orwell’s life and on the cultural significance of roses . . . Most affecting is the surprising hopefulness implicit in a political writer’s passion for nature: ‘Orwell did not believe in permanent happiness or the politics that tried to realize it, but he did believe devoutly in moments of delight, even rapture.’”
—The New Yorker

“Expansive and thought-provoking . . . in the hands of a skilled novelist or essayist like Solnit [...] a biography becomes something else entirely. It begins in the middle. It skips the boring bits. It possesses a voice, and a point of view. It is unapologetically incomplete, and trusts the readers to go elsewhere to find out whatever else they might like to know . . . Orwell’s Roses takes its place alongside other great non-biography biographies written by acclaimed authors who know how to tell a good story.”
—The Washington Post 

“[A] maverick meditation on Orwell’s legacy . . . an exploration of what it means to plant a rose, what roses mean in general, and what Orwell means to Solnit . . . [they] share vital common ground. His ambition to ‘make political writing into an art’ has been central to Solnit’s project from the start.”
—The New York Review of Books

“Widely read in Orwell’s work and never afraid to ask awkward questions of him, Ms. Solnit seems especially exercised by the apparent contradiction between a progressive political standpoint and the pursuit of personal pleasure.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“One of the pleasures of reading Orwell's Roses is its unexpected turns from one subject to the next . . . Solnit is having fun when she makes these connections—finding joy in the intellectual pursuit of writing and thinking. That she allows herself to do so in a book that is in many ways very serious too is in keeping with the very aesthetics it's engaging with. ‘Clarity, precision, accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness are aesthetic values to him, and pleasures,’ she writes about Orwell. But she may as well have been describing her own, or at least this book's, aesthetic values and pleasures as well.”
—NPR

“[L]uminous . . . an ode to trees, gardens, and especially roses—all of which Orwell cultivated with a passion—and a contemplation of authoritarianism, resistance, pleasure, and the natural world.”
—O Quarterly

“[A] brand-new piece of nonfiction from celebrated author and journalist Rebecca Solnit that reconsiders George Orwell’s legacy once and for all . . . [she] examines Orwell’s lifelong fascination with gardening from all possible directions . . . The task that Solnit has set for herself in this book is mighty, but she’s more than up to it as a writer and a thinker; nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way.”
—Vogue

“Elegant . . . muses on Orwell with all Rebecca Solnit’s luminous intelligence and trademark optimism. If ‘Orwellian’ has become synonymous with darkness and oppression, she opens up his life affirming love of gardening, of wild nature and life’s physical pleasure, his antidote to the grim puritanism of ideologues”
—The Guardian

“Orwell’s Roses is, from its beautiful cover to its impassioned coda, one of [Solnit's] very best . . . [A] multifaceted tribute . . . at once a biographical study of this champion of freedom, an impressive work of cultural and literary criticism and a testament to Solnit’s far-ranging curiosity . . . [She] leaves no row unhoed as she simultaneously explores the roots of Orwell’s prolific literary output and the fecund history of roses . . . [A] triumph, a delight of digressions.&rdquo…