Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Recollections of My Nonexistence, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian and other publications.

NEW PERSEPCTIVE ON ORWELL: Solnit presents a counterbalance to Orwell's cold eye on political monstrosity, one of real value in this time of runaway climate change when the natural world has become so imperiled.SPEAKS TO FLOURISHING TRENDS IN GARDENING AND PLANTING: Interest in vegetable and flower gardening has blossomed since the pandemic hit; Solnit's book will be of interest to the increasing number of people who are growing their own food and curious about nature and ecology.ENCOMPASSES EVERYTHING THAT SOLNIT IS PASSIONATE ABOUT: Orwell's Roses draws on Solnit's interest in nature and the politics of nature, landscape, the shape of time, hope, climate change, justice, human rights, and resistance.ONGOING POPULARITY OF ORWELL: Orwell's novels in particular are being read now as much as they ever were, in this age of growing tendencies towards totalitarianism.

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.