Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air: Introduction by Joh [Hardcover]

For the first time in one hardcover volume—three classic novels by the author ofNineteen Eighty- FourandAnimal Farm.

The lushly descriptive and tragicBurmese Days,a devastating indictment of British colonial rule, is based on Orwell’s own experience while serving in the Indian Imperial Police. His beloved satirical classic,Keep the Aspidistra Flying,features a young idealist whose attempt to rebel against middle-class respectability—by working in a bookshop and trying to be a writer—goes terribly and comically awry. The hero ofComing Up for Airtries to escape the bleakness of suburbia by returning to the idyllic rural village of his childhood—only to find that the simpler England he remembers so nostalgically is gone forever.

These three novels share Orwell’s unsparing vision of the dark side of modern capitalist society in combination with his comic brilliance and his unerring compassion for humanity.George Orwellwas born in 1903 and died in 1950.

John Careyis Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy.From the Introduction by John Carey

The fame ofAnimal FarmandNineteen Eighty-Fourhas eclipsed Orwell's novels of the 1930s. They tend to be though of, if at all, as false starts — attempts at a kind of fiction that he outgrew once he got into his stride. This is a mistake, and one that diminishes Orwell. For the 1930s novels are unique and compelling, and they have scenes and incidents striking enough to ensure he would be remembered had he written nothing else. (This is true even of the weakest,A Clergyman's Daughter, which is omitted from this volume because Orwell did not wish it to be reprinted.) What's more, these novels show his capacity for something that his later works lack — namely, doubt. Each of them is a study in ambivalence. They subvert their own certainties l“.