Pincher Martin: Introduced by Marlon James

Description

An hour on this rock is a lifetime. Christopher Martin, the sole survivor of a torpedoed destroyer, is stranded upon a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Pitted against him are the sea, the sun, the brutal cold, and the aching terror of his isolation. To drink there is a pool of rainwater; to eat, seaweed and anemones, preyed upon by feathered reptiles. As he descends into the abyss of his consciousness, weathering lightning strikes of memory, Martin must try to assemble the truth of his fate - piece by terrible piece.

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. Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. He is the author of numerous award-winning novels, and A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. His most recent novel is the New York Times-bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award, among other accolades.

The utmost inventiveness ... No reader will forget the world it reveals. - Kingsley Amis