Coming Up for Air (Annotated)

Published in 1939, Coming Up for Air is George Orwell's darkly comic meditation on memory, modernity, and the uneasy approach of war. Narrated by George Bowling, a middle-aged insurance salesman, the novel follows his furtive return to the country town of his youth, only to find it transformed by suburban sprawl, commercial vulgarity, and historical amnesia. Its plain, sardonic prose, characterist...