An George Orwell at his most subtle, ironic, witty, and entertaining.
The themes and ideas that would later shape his famous novels Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are already present here, in a novel that is equally compelling and prophetic.
George Bowling is a forty-five-year-old insurance salesman: married, with children, a mortgage, false teeth, a growing belly, and an overwhelming desire to escape his dreary everyday life and the fears haunting him — fears of the coming war and everything that will follow: hunger, unemployment, repression, and tyranny.
So he decides to run away for a while by returning to his hometown, a paradise of countryside lanes, ponds, fishing trips, and memories of adolescent romances, hoping to catch his breath before facing everything that lies ahead.
