Burning Down George Orwell's House: A Novel - Andrew Ervin.epub

Ray Welter, who was until recently a high-flying advertising executive in Chicago, has left the world of newspeak behind. He decamps to the isolated Scottish Isle of Jura in order to spend a few months in the cottage where George Orwell wrote most of his seminal novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ray is miserable, and quite prepared to make his troubles go away with the help of copious quantities of excellent scotch.

But a few of the local islanders take a decidedly shallow view of a foreigner coming to visit in order to sort himself out, and Ray quickly finds himself having to deal with not only his own issues but also a community whose eccentricities are at times amusing and at others downright dangerous. Also, the locals believe—or claim to believe—that there’s a werewolf about, and against his better judgment, Ray’s misadventures build to the night of a traditional, boozy werewolf hunt on the Isle of Jura on the summer solstice.

PRAISE
“Burning Down George Orwell’s House is really most enjoyable, a witty, original turn on the life and memory of the Sage of Jura, taking place on the island where he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Eric Blair serves as the McGuffin in this story, which is one part black comedy and one part a meditation on modern life. It is well-written and truly original.”
–Robert Stone

“Ray Welter — corrupted, debauched, cuckolded, fighting all the way down — is a brilliant creation, and Andrew Ervin’s Burning Down George Orwell’s House is a work of laudable mischief.”
–Owen King

“Beyond being a vastly entertaining novel, cunningly observed and delicately flavored with the very finest Scotch whiskey on the planet, Burning Down George Orwell’s House is a serious meditation on just how Orwellian our world has really become. Let Andrew Ervin help you imagine your way to a world beyond Big Brother.”
–Madison Smartt Bell

“A dramatic, thoughtful, and at times comic revisiting of (and attempt to escape from) Orwell's world. ”
–KIRKUS

“A wildly compelling debut novel from the original and inspired pen of Andrew Ervin, BURNING DOWN GEORGE ORWELL'S HOUSE is a captivating novel soaked in wit and whiskey. A dark, but striking read, the author ingeniously draws you into the disturbing world of Jura and it’s menacing inhabitants. A wickedly funny book, I was moved and excited, a highly effective and poetic revelation on consumer living. I fucking loved it.”
–LISA O'DONNELL, AUTHOR OF THE DEATH OF BEES

“Burning Down George Orwell's House is fiction as highwire act, and Ray Welter is a nowhere man for the ages, going down and out in the shadow of the man himself. Ervine tosses up hilarity and horror, musicality and menace, with page after page of firecracker prose. ”
—MARLON JAMES

“Wry and engaging ... Nineteen Eighty-Four casts a long shadow over countless books—but not this one ... Ervin has achieved something uniquely refreshing: a book that shows the taste and restraint to pay knowing, affectionate and humorous tribute to George Orwell without trying to prove him right—or to create some redundant simulacrum of his work.”
–PASTE MAGAZINE

“As all good comedies do, Ervin's novel contains a sober question at its core — in this case, whether the idea of "escape" itself is just another manipulation sold to us "proles" by the very same wired world that engulfs and exhausts us. Take a wild guess what George Orwell would say. ”
–MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR'S FRESH AIR