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Kallocain

Penguin Classics

by Karin Boye

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Narrator Claes Bang

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Translator David McDuff

Length 8 hours 17 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the author

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Claes Bang, best known for his role in the BBC's & Netflix's Dracula. This definitive recording includes an introduction by David McDuff.

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 the Second World War were unfolding, Karin Boye's classic dystopian novel speaks more clearly than ever of the dangers of acquiescence, and the power of resistance, no matter how futile.

(P) Penguin Audio 2020

Classics Fiction Science Fiction Apocalyptic & Dystopian

Karin Boye (Author)
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 (Translator)
David McDuff's translations for Penguin Classics include Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot, and Babel's short stories.