Experience a shipwrecked sailor's disintegration into 'a naked madman on a rock' by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies, introduced by Marlon James. An hour on this rock is a lifetime.
Glistening limpets. Lobster claws. Wild tangles of seaweed. Slowly, his eyes open. Everywhere, there is sea. Only this jagged peak interrupts the vast expanse of the Atlantic: a tooth in a gaping jaw. But he will survive. Rainwater can be drunk; anemones eaten. He dries his oilskin beneath the screaming gulls, and discovers his papers: Christopher Hadley Martin, TY. Lieut., R.N.V.R. Weathering lightning strikes of memory, he must now reconstruct his fate - piece by terrible piece.
'Wizardry of the first order.' Observer 'Terrifying . Magnificently original.' Sylvia Plath
'Devastating ... Violently real ... The unique kind of novel that compels you to reread it.' Marlon James
'An amazing tour de force ... A blow-by-blow struggle for survival.' Stephen Spender
'Immense ... To read it is to undergo a shattering and memorable experience.' Kingsley Amis
'A master fabulist ... An iconoclast.' John Fowles
'The utmost inventiveness, assurance and power...Nor reader will soon forget the world it reveals.' Kingsley Amis
'Like a cold sweat, a day-mare, or going under gas...Prose more tightly packed, more jaggedly concrete, I can't imagine; and the shock ending ...is technical wizardry of the first order.' Kenneth Tynan, Observer
'Remarkably sustained imaginative intensity.' TLS
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.
