Jeden – Karp David (2025)

Somewhere in an indeterminate distant future, a benevolent totalitarian state has suppressed poverty and crime and guarantees happiness to all its citizens who comply with its rules.

Professor Burden considers himself a loyal citizen, but the Internal Investigation Office discovers that he subconsciously doubts the state's methods and secretly values his own individuality. An investigator named Lark is so horrified by the subtlety of Burden's anti-state heresy that he chooses him as his extraordinary project. He is convinced that he can rid Burden of his individualistic feelings and make him a normal, productive member of society again. He wants to try to persuade him to do so, but if necessary, he is willing to resort to completely erasing his identity.

The novel One, first published in 1953, depicts the paranoid atmosphere of a totalitarian society where personal freedoms are considered a threat to the state and individualism must be brutally controlled. This informatively written psychological thriller ranks alongside Orwell's, Huxley's, and Zamyatin's works as one of the great dystopian novels of its time.