Author(s): Karin Boye; David McDuff (Introduction by, Translator)

Novel | Dystopia, Science Fiction and Fantasy | Translated fiction | Sweden

The classic World War II-era dystopian novel, written at the midpoint between Brave New World and 1984, in its first new translation in more than fifty years. 

Leo Kall is a zealous middle-ranking scientist in the totalitarian World State who has just made a thrilling discovery: a new drug, Kallocain, that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. At last, criminality will be dragged out into the open and private thought can finally be outlawed. But can the World State be trusted with Kallocain? For that matter, can Kall himself be trusted? Written as the terrible events of World War II were unfolding, Karin Boye's classic dystopian novel speaks more clearly than ever of the dangers of acquiescence and the power of resistance.

Review: "Thrilling . . . [It] mesmerizes. . . . Relationships are the true heart of Kallocain: how intimacies shape us, how the presence of difference can free us, and how what is freely given between people is always so much more powerful and real than what is taken by force." -Ilana Masad, NPR
"The world of the Swedish writer Karin Boye's little-known 1940 novel, Kallocain, is a close cousin to those depicted in We and Brave New World. . . . The women characters in many classic twentieth-century dystopias tend to be flat, mere foils to male protagonists. But in Kallocain it is the inner lives of women that come to illustrate both the state's power over its citizens and their own power to resist." -The New Yorker
"A fascinating novel of the 1984 and Brave New World genre." -Library Journal

Author Biography: Karin Boye (1900-41), born in Sweden, was a poet and anti-Fascist who translated The Waste Land into Swedish. After undergoing psychoanalysis in Berlin, she left her husband and formed a lifelong relationship with another woman, Margot Hanel. Her most famous book, Kallocain (1940), was partly inspired by eye-opening trips to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Boye committed suicide the year after writing the novel. David McDuff's translations for Penguin Classics include Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, and Babel's short stories.