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Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

George Orwell
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
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Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics) + Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Penguin Modern Classics) + Down and Out in Paris and London (Penguin Modern Classics)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Classics; New Ed edition (25 Jan 2001)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0141185694
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141185699
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 26,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

George Orwell
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Product Description

Product Description

Years in insurance and marriage to the joyless Hilda have been no more than death in life to George Bowling. This and fear of another war take his mind back to the peace of his childhood in a small country town. But his return journey to Lower Binfield brings complete disillusionment.

About the Author

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there. At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame. George Orwell died in London in January 1950.

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Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics)
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Customer Reviews

19 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (19 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The future is all rotten, 22 April 2006
This review is from: Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)
Orwell captures the spirit of a generation here. His central character sees salvation in returning to the happy environment of his youth, and with it some escape from a wretched existence. Yet, he finds nothing but change and is disillusioned by the experience. It's a novel that explores the theme of the modern world and a changing society. We often feel that in the present fast-moving world we have a monopoly on complaining about the world of the future. Orwell demonstrate's that unease about changing towns, cities, and nations has existed for as long as people have lived in communities.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Undeservedly neglected - one of Orwell's best, 15 July 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)
I doubt if 1% or the people who've read "1984" or "Animal Farm" have read this novel. This is sad indeed, as it's a fine novel in its own right, not just a book to be read for Orwell completists. The narrator, George Bowling, is an ordinary, pretty decent middle England sort of character, trapped in a lifeless marriage and nostalgic for days gone past. To try to recapture better days, he revisits his home town - but things don't go as planned... The plot of the book is sparse, with much of the text being George's recollections of old times and people, and his observations about British (or should that be English) life in the 1930s. Orwell's powers of observation were never sharper than here, and in the narrator, he created one of his few memorable fictional characters. And there's humour too. It is interesting to compare this novel with some popular books of the late 50s and early 60s such as "Hurry on Down" and "Saturday Night & Sunday Morning". I found myself wondering whether Orwell was the spiritual father of the Angry Young Men.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Funny, touching and beautifully invoking 2 historic periods, 6 Mar 2000
By asandk@yahoo.co.uk (Derbyshire, England) - See all my reviews
This book has long been a great personal favourite. It is fashionable to talk down Orwell as a novelist and to concentrate on the essays and journalism. Well, most of his less well-known novels do not really work. But this one does. It brilliantly invokes national anxiety on the eve of the Second World War, and also, in a long retrospective, life in ordinary upper-working/lower-middle class Edwardian England before the horrors of 1914-18 were in sight. And in tracing the decline of historic shops and townscapes, and the rise of the east midlands new towns, and sets out how we got from one to the other.

George Bowling, the book's narrator, is finely drawn: pathetic, doomed, but eternally resilient and resigned. he gives the book a delightful comedy which drives it across its political landscapes.

And all is in Orwell's finest informal, elegant prose.

A real treat.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Orwell at his funniest and most autobiographical
If you only read the apocalyptic misery of 1984 or the gut-wrenching descriptions of extreme squalor in Down and Out in Paris and London and A Clergyman's Daughter, you would... Read more
Published 25 days ago by Gitau Githinji

5.0 out of 5 stars A vivid picture of an England not long gone but long forgotten
I am not a purist literary critic by any means and struggled to detect all the hints of 1984 and Animal Farm that others have spotted, but I prefer to look at this novel on its... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Neil Russell-Bates

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Stuff - Definitely worth reading.
What always strikes me about Orwell's writing is the amount of meaning he imbues into such apparently simple language. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Garth Algar

5.0 out of 5 stars Coming Back for Air
I first became aware of this book when I heard it on 'A Book at Bedtime' on Radio 4 in about 1975. I have read it a number of times in the subsequent 35 years & it is always a... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Patrick 7

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully readable and true to life
An absolutely wonderful evocative novel, full of witty and poignant observations about lower middle class life between the wars, the fear of war (this was published in 1939), the... Read more
Published 19 months ago by John Hopper

5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favourite books.
I think all Orwell`s books are brilliant but I love this one the most, having just read it again for the umpteenth time. Read more
Published 24 months ago by G. E. Mitchell

5.0 out of 5 stars a Middle class dude of the 1930s goes back to his old neighboorhood.
a funny story about a mans reminiscences of his home town where he grew up.
Published on 21 Mar 2008 by B. J. Crossley

5.0 out of 5 stars England your England
Nobody has ever claimed that this is George Orwell's greatest novel. Nobody except me - it is. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm will always have more intellectual respect, but... Read more
Published on 5 Aug 2006 by Matthew Mercy

5.0 out of 5 stars Coming up for air- what air?
George Bowling,middle-aged, pot- bellied and unhappily married with two children, goes through a mid-life crisis which takes him back to Lower Binfield where he grew up. Read more
Published on 30 July 2006 by Bobby

5.0 out of 5 stars oh yes! A must read!
wonderfully nostalgic and witty, i loved every page. Having read the majority of Orwell's work this one was beautifully simplistic and a joy to read.
Published on 28 July 2005 by michael carolan

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