Coming Up for Air

About this book

George Bowling is a middle-aged insurance salesman hemmed in by bills, suburban routine, false teeth, and the gathering expectation of another war. A small windfall gives him the chance to revisit Lower Binfield, the country town of his childhood, and the hidden pool where enormous fish once represented a world untouched by modern pressure. What he finds is not recovered innocence but a landscape transformed by development, commerce, and historical fear. George Orwell combines comedy, nostalgia, and political unease in a novel about the desire to escape time. Bowling comes up for air only to discover that the past cannot supply oxygen to the present.