A new edition of Orwell's elegiac fourth novel, introduced and annotated by his biographer, D.J.TaylorFirst published in 1939 and dominated by the shadow of the Second World War, Coming up for Air finds fat, middle-aged and unhappily-married George Bowling trying to revisit the world of his Edwardian childhood in rural Oxforshire, only to discover that the certainties of his past are dead and that a very different future is looming up to claim him. This new edition includes an introduction and extensive end-notes, and an appendix containing original responses to the novel as well as letters and documents from the period in which it was written.