'Coming Up for Air' (1939) by George Orwell

Coming Up for Air is the seventh book and fourth novel by English writer George Orwell. It was written between 1938 and 1939 while Orwell spent time recuperating from illness in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh.

The story follows George Bowling, a 45-year-old husband, father, and insurance salesman, who foresees World War II and attempts to recapture idyllic childhood innocence and escape his dreary life by returning to Lower Binfield, his birthplace.

The novel is comical and pessimistic, with its views that speculative builders, commercialism, and capitalism are killing the best of rural England, and his country is facing the sinister appearance of new, external national threats.

Background: As a child, Orwell lived at Shiplake and Henley in the Thames Valley. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was a civil servant in British India, and he lived a genteel life with his mother and two sisters, though spending much of the year at boarding school at Eastbourne and later at Eton in Britain. He particularly enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits with a neighbouring family.