The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Kallocain

Kallocain

Penguin Classics

Summary

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

Reviews

  • The woman who reimagined the dystopian novel
    Talya Zax, The New Yorker

About the author

Karin Boye

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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more