Experience a shipwrecked sailor's psychic disintegration into'a naked madman on a rock' by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies.An hour on this rock is a lifetime.Glistening limpets. The claws of a lobster. 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.'Devastating ... Violently real ... The unique kind of novel that compels you to reread it.' Marlon James'Wizardry of the first order.' Observer'Terrifying . Magnificently original.' Sylvia Plath'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

William Golding (1911 - 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated in Marlborough and Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, lecturer, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and invasion of Holland. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers but rescued from the'slush pile' at Faber and published in 1954. It became a modern classic selling millions of copies, translated into 35 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. Recently, the Times ranked Golding third on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. www.william-golding.co.uk