Still one of the cleanest examples of allegory doing actual structural work rather than wearing a clever hat and expecting applause.

The surface is simple: the animals overthrow their human owner and attempt to build a fairer society. The rot, naturally, comes from inside the new order. Pigs become managers, slogans become weapons, history gets rewritten in real time, and everyone discovers that equality is much easier to paint on a wall than to live under. Lovely bedtime stuff. For children, apparently, because publishing categories were invented by people who have never met a child.

Penguin paperback. Original work first published 1945; Penguin first published 1951. This text first published in the Complete Works of George Orwell series in 1987, with a new note on the text added in 1989.