Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

George Orwell's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, Coming Up for Air, is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture childhood innocence as war looms on the horizon.

The Story

George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with children, is:

• An insurance salesman with an expanding waistline
• The owner of a new set of false teeth
• A man with a desperate desire to escape his dreary life

Living in 1939, with the Second World War imminent, George fears modern times. He foresees:

• Food queues
• Soldiers
• Secret police
• Tyranny

To find solace, George decides to escape to the world of his childhood — the village he remembers as a rural haven of peace and tranquillity. But his return journey to Lower Binfield may bring only a more complete disillusionment...

Praise for Coming Up for Air

"Very funny, as well as invigoratingly realistic ... Nineteen Eighty-Four is here in embryo. So is Animal Farm ... not many novels carry the seeds of two classics as well as being richly readable themselves."
— John Carey, Sunday Times