The Spire: Introduced by Benjamin Myers

Description

There were three sorts of people. Those who ran, those who stayed, and those who were built in. Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire. His master builder fearfully advises against it, for the old cathedral was miraculously built without foundations. But Jocelin is obsessed with fashioning his prayer in stone, and his halo of hair grows wilder and his dark angel darker as the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, watched over by the gargoyles - until the stone pillars shriek, the earth beneath creeps, and the spire's shadow falls like an axe on the medieval world below ...

William Golding (1911 - 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated at Oxford. In his youth he was a keen actor, lecturer, small-boat sailor, and musician. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy, where he saw action against battleships and pursued the Bismarck; after the war, he became a schoolteacher until 1961. Golding's debut novel,Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954 after being rescued from Faber & Faber's slush pile of manuscripts, and was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, as well as being knighted in 1988. Recently, the Times ranked Golding third on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.