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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week my guest is the double plus good novelist Sandra Newman.

His new book is Julia, which is a retelling of George Orwell's 1984 from the point of view of its female protagonist, Julia. Sandra, welcome. Thanks. Hi, Sam. Can I start by

asking, I guess, the really obvious question is, what was the germ of this? When did it occur to you

that there was sort of space in Orwell's book for another story?

Well, it's funny because I actually, it didn't occur to me. I actually got a phone call

from my agent who said that George Orwell's estate was looking for somebody to write this book

and would I be interested. So it's funny because I always feel

like this is a great confession. It wasn't actually my idea. It was their idea. Or you could also

say it's an idea that's been in the air forever and kind of exists in the minds of at least a certain

subset of people who read 1984.

At a certain point, like a few weeks ago, I went and looked up 1984 fan fiction,

and a good third of it is written from the point of view of Julia,

and it's about investigating the point of view of Julia.

So it's something that's been kind of like about to happen for a very

long time and it became much more about to happen recently because 1984 is coming out of copyright in

Britain and they decided they would get ahead of that and find somebody who they were comfortable with

...