It all began the day when he got his new false teeth. George Bowling, a suburban insurance salesman, escapes London and an insidious sense of impending war to return to Lower Binfield, his childhood home near the Thames. Written in 1938 and published in 1939, Coming Up for Air captures the pre-war anxiety, the tension between nostalgia and progress and deals with many similar themes to 1984.
The Orwell Foundation