Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

This hauntingly prophetic novel centres around a not-too-distant future where happiness is allocated on a TV screen, individuals and scholars are outcasts and books are burned by a special task-force of firemen.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.

The Classic novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 is part of the Voyager Classic series. It stands alongside Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization's enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.

Bradbury's powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to creat a novel which, forty years on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.