Books like Julia by Sandra Newman

George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 explores the chilling power of totalitarian regimes, surveillance, and propaganda in a future society.

Jennifer Egan’s interlocking narratives weave the lives of Bennie Salazar, a former punk rocker turned record executive, and Sasha, a restless young woman, across decades and continents, exploring music, memory and the fragile threads that bind us.

A story of a man who keeps reincarnating until he finds a way to change the past and prevent a tragic future from unfolding.

A five‑year‑old boy and his mother are held in a small room, and the story unfolds through the boy’s perspective, highlighting the harrowing effects of captivity.

A woman born on a snowy night in 1910 dies and is reborn repeatedly, each life giving her the chance to alter history as the world heads toward another global conflict.

Michael Cunningham’s lyrical novel weaves Virginia Woolf’s final days with contemporary tales of love, inheritance, hope, and despair, centering on poet Richard and his friend Clarissa as they navigate fame and personal fulfillment.

A tale of love and war between a soldier and a Venetian woman during Napoleon's tumultuous Napoleonic Wars era, blending reality with fantasy and imagination to create a mesmerizing and hypnotic narrative.

A family’s idyllic summer party at a grand estate in Cornwall turns into a desperate search when six‑year‑old Theo vanishes, leaving the house abandoned and the siblings torn apart.

A feminist retelling of the Ramayana’s little‑known heroine, Kaikeyi, tracing how her choices and the forces that shape her turn a beloved daughter into an outcast.

After inheriting a vast fortune, Julia Carleton defies her family's expectations and seeks independence, only to find herself drawn into a seductive but dangerous romance with the gambling rake, Lord Alysford.

George Orwell’s classic collection brings together the satirical social critique of *Animal Farm* and *Burmese Days*, the intimate portraits of *The Clergyman's Daughter*, *Coming Up for Air* and *Keep the Aspidistra Flying*, as well as the chilling dystopia of *Nineteen Eighty‑Four*.

A rough street urchin finds herself wedded to an aristocratic lord, determined to turn her into a lady and prove her worth in a scandalous bet.

A dystopian exploration of surveillance, authoritarian control, and the manipulation of language and truth.

Addressing general readers as well as software practitioners, *Software and Mind* discusses the fallacies of the mechanistic ideology and the degradation of minds caused by these fallacies. Mechanism holds that every aspect of the world can be represented as a simple hierarchical structure of entities. But, while useful in fields like mathematics and manufacturing, this idea is generally worthless, because most aspects of the world are too complex to be reduced to simple structures. Our software-related affairs, in particular, cannot be represented in this fashion. And yet, all programming theories and development systems, and all software applications, attempt to reduce real-world problems to neat hierarchical structures of data, operations, and features. Using Karl Popper's famous principles of demarcation between science and pseudoscience, the book shows that the mechanistic ideology has turned most of our software-related activities into pseudoscientific pursuits. Using mechanism as warrant, the software elites are promoting invalid, even fraudulent, software notions. They force us to depend on generic, inferior systems, instead of allowing us to develop software skills and to create our own systems. Software mechanism emulates the methods of manufacturing, and thereby restricts us to high levels of abstraction and simple, isolated structures. The benefits of software, however, can be attained only if we start with low-level elements and learn to create complex, interacting structures. Software, the book argues, is a non-mechanistic phenomenon. So it is akin to language, not to manufactured objects. Like language, it permits us to mirror the world in our minds and to communicate with it. Moreover, we increasingly depend on software in everything we do, in the same way that we depend on language. Thus, being restricted to mechanistic software is like thinking and communicating while being restricted to some ready-made sentences supplied by an elite. Ultimately, by impoverishing software, our elites are achieving what the totalitarian elite described by George Orwell in *Nineteen Eighty-Four* achieves by impoverishing language: they are degrading our minds.