Close Quarters: Introduced by Helen Castor

Description

This tropical nowhere was the whole world - the whole imaginable world. A decrepit warship is becalmed halfway to Australia, stilled in an ocean wilderness of heat and sea mists. In this surreal, fete-like atmosphere, a ball is held with a passing ship: the passengers dance and flirt, while beneath them seaweed like green hair spreads omniously over the hull. Half-mad with fear, drink, love and opium, both vessel and passengers feel themselves going to pieces: and the very planks seem to twist themselves alive as the ship comes apart at the seams . . . 'No living writer has represented the fragility of man's experience so marvellously as Golding.' - AS Byatt 'It is in Golding's magnificent, therapeutic, terrifying descriptions of seascapes that the deepest meanings can be found.' - Kate Mosse To The Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy - Book Two

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. www.william-golding.co.uk Helen Castor is a historian of the later middle ages and sixteenth century and a Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Her books include the prize-winning Blood & Roses, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, Joan of Arc: A History and Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity (for the Penguin Monarchs series). Castor has also presented programmes for BBC TV and radio and Channel 4, including BBC documentaries based on She-Wolves and Joan of Arc. She has one son, and lives in London.

'Stunning . . . As exciting as any thriller.' - Sunday Times 'A feat of imaginative reconstruction, as vivid as a dream.' - Daily Mail 'Tells an utterly absorbing tale, in language of immense force and subtlety.' - Financial Times