Coming Up for Air
A middle-aged insurance man revisits his boyhood town and finds it gone, in Orwell's novel of nostalgia and looming war.
George Bowling, a paunchy middle-aged insurance salesman, slips away from his dreary suburban life to revisit the country town where he grew up. He finds it swallowed by development and his memories mocked by the present, all under the shadow of the coming war. Narrated with rueful humor, the novel is Orwell’s elegy for a vanishing England and a warning about the anxious, mechanized world replacing it.
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