Author(s): Adam Biles

Novel | England | Galley Beggar Press

Adam Biles's anarchic return to Animal Farm is a warped fable; a state-of-the-farmyard novel about back-stabbers, truth-twisters and corrupt charlatans.Manor Farm has reinvented itself as the South of England's premium petting zoo.Now humans and beasts alike are invited (for a small fee) to come and stroke, fondle, and take rides on the farm's inhabitants.But life is not a bed of roses for the animals, in spite of what their leaders may want them to believe. Elections are murky, the community is beset by factions, and sacred mottos are being constantly updated. Manor Farm is descending into chaos. What's more, a mysterious illness has started ripping through its residents, killing them one by one...In Beasts of England, Adam Biles honours, updates and subverts George Orwell's classic, all the while channelling the chaos of populist politics in the internet age into a savage farmyard satire.

“Orwell is one of the great writers of fear, but where Animal Farm works by suggestion Biles’s novel puts everything on show, and in doing so stops the reader several times through its sheer brutality.” —The Telegraph

“The past decade in world politics offers plenty of easy opportunities to invoke George Orwell. But writing a sequel to Animal Farm, a book that exemplifies Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic – that we don’t need to have read it to know it – is a riskier undertaking. In Beasts of England, Adam Biles has updated and retooled Animal Farm for today, and in this clever, resourceful and at times painful novel, the risk pays off.” —The Guardian