This was Golding’s 2nd published novel and hailed by critics as his best, so startling was it that one, Arthur Koestler, described it as ‘an earthquake in the petrified forests of the English Novel’.
55 years on the novel charting the downfall of the Neanderthals, from their perspective, by the violent race of Homo Sapiens is still shocking.
Hunt, trek, and feast among Neanderthals in this stunning novel by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies, introduced by Ben Okri. This was a different voice; not the voice of the people. It was the voice of other.
When spring comes, the people leave their winter cave, foraging for honey, grubs, and the hot richness of a deer's brain. They awaken the fire to heat their naked bodies, lay down their thorn bushes, and share pictures in their minds. But strange things are happening: inexplicable scents and sounds. Imaginable beasts are half-glimpsed in the forest; upright creatures of bone-faces and deerskins. What the people do not know is that their day is already over ...
'Extraordinary ... Genius ... Remarkable in the literature of the twentieth century.' Ben Okri
'A stun gun to read ... Truly a masterpiece.' Monique Roffey
'An earthquake in the petrified forests of the English novel.' Arthur Koestler
'An astonishing, underrated novel.' Robert MacFarlane
'Beautiful, powerful ... A visionary dream . Shakespearean.' Ted Hughes
'A master fabulist, and a brilliantly creative interpreter of remote history ... An iconoclast.' John Fowles
'A tour de force ... Genius.' Daily Telegraph
'Alarming, eye-opening, desolating, mind-invading and unique.' New Statesman
'I admire Golding pushing beyond his own experiences to explore ancient worlds and altered states of consciousness.' Rose Tremain
'An astonishing and original tour de force ...Golding is a genius.' Daily Telegraph
Author
About William Golding
William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, submarines and aircraft. He was present at the sinking of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-day invasion, and later at the island of Welcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961.
Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.
