Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)

By: George Orwell

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.

George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with children, is an insurance salesman with an expanding waistline, a new set of false teeth - and a desperate desire to escape his dreary life. He fears modern times - since, in 1939, the Second World War is imminent - foreseeing food queues, soldiers, secret police and tyranny. So he decides to escape to the world of his childhood, to 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 ...

'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

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B01BITA3CQ
• ISBN13: 9780141185699
• Release Date: February 2001
• Publisher: Penguin Classic
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.7" x 5.1"