A fable about good and evil that presents a nightmare vision of the future. Alex is a vicious fifteen-year-old droog, a criminal who talks in a brutal invented slang. When the state undertakes to reform Alex, the novel asks, "at what cost?".
A fictitious story told in rhyming verse, relating the amorous adventures of Michael Byrne, an Irish artist and composer who disappears in World War II Germany and later unites the children he has fathered for the reading of his will.
In the Slav-oriented state of the future, the Lower Orders are in ascendence and happy hooligans roam the London streets, bashing senior citizens in the eyes with bicycle chains.
A violent teen named Alex is "rehabilitated" by the government in this satirical view of the future of the industrialized world; also includes a glossary of the novel's Russian-based "nadsat" language.
