Book discussion: Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

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 Nineteen Eighty-Four.

‘Very funny, as well as invigoratingly realistic… Nineteen Eighty-Four is here in embryo. So is Animal Farm... not many novels carry the seeds of two classics as well as being richly readable themselves’
John Carey, The Sunday Times

A discussion of George Orwell’s funny but disturbing novel introduced by Justine Brian, associate fellow of the Academy of Ideas and director of schools at Civitas.