Coming Up for Air

Coming Up for Air
First edition cover
AuthorGeorge Orwell
LanguageEnglish
GenreSatire
PublisherVictor Gollancz
Publication date
12 June 1939
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Pages237 (UK hardcover edition)
Preceded byHomage to Catalonia 
Followed byInside the Whale and Other Essays 

Coming Up for Air is the seventh book and fourth novel by English writer George Orwell, published in June 1939 by Victor Gollancz. It was written between 1938 and 1939 while Orwell spent time recuperating from illness in French Morocco, mainly in Marrakesh. He delivered the completed manuscript to Victor Gollancz upon his return to London in March 1939.

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 that his country is facing the sinister appearance of new, external national threats.