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
A Penguin Classic
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. William Golding (1911 – 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and liberation of Holland. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers but rescued from the "reject pile" at Faber and published in 1954. It became a modern classic selling millions of copies, translated into 44 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding wrote eleven other novels, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in 1993.
Marlon James (introduction) is the author of John Crow's Devil, The Book of Night Women, the 2015 Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and NYT-bestseller Moon Witch, Spider King, the second book in the Dark Star trilogy.
