Coming Up for Air

George Bowling, a fat, middle-aged insurance salesman living in a London suburb on the eve of another war, wins a little money and decides to revisit Lower Binfield, the Thames Valley town of his Edwardian boyhood. He remembers fishing, a first love, and a world that seemed solid. The present is hire purchase, a nagging marriage, and the certainty of bombs. When he reaches the town, development and a new population have erased the places he came to recover. First published in 1939, the novel is a first-person account of one man's attempt to breathe outside a life he already knows is closing.

Bound in plasticised paper printed with a colourful wrap-around picture. Speckled light-brown endpapers. Dark blue slipcase.