Lord of the Flies: Introduced by Stephen King

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ONE OF THE BBC'S '100 NOVELS THAT SHAPED OUR WORLD' 'The first book with hands - strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, 'This is not just entertainment; it's life or death.' ... I've been thinking about it ever since, for fifty years and more.' - Stephen King 'One of my favorite books - I read it every couple of years.' - Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages? What's grown-ups going to think? Going off-hunting pigs-letting fires out-and now! A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. By day, they explore the dazzling beaches, gorging fruit, seeking shelter, and ripping off their uniforms to swim in the lagoon. At night, in the darkness of the jungle, they are haunted by nightmares of a primitive beast. Orphaned by society, they must forge their own; but it isn't long before their innocent games devolve into a murderous hunt ... 'Thrills me with all the power a fiction can have ... Exemplary.' - Ian McEwan 'Beautifully written, tragic and provocative.' - E. M. Forster 'Stands out mightily in my memory ... Such a strong statement about the human heart.' Patricia Cornwell 'Terrifying and haunting.' Kingsley Amis

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 Stephen King (1947 - ) was born in Portland, Maine. He began writing in the 1960s and 1970s while working as an English teacher, King is now the award-winning author of more than fifty books, all worldwide bestsellers, including Carrie and The Shining. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to the American Letters, the 2007 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the 2014 National Medal of Arts.

'An existential fable backlit with death's incandescent glare.' - Ben Okri 'Violently real ... An apocalyptic novelist [who writes with] humanist rage and defiance.' - Marlon James 'Beautiful and desperate, something quite out of the ordinary.' - Stevie Smith 'A fragment of nightmare.' - New Statesman 'A post-apocalyptic, dystopian survivor-fantasy ... [A novel] for all time ... A cult classic.' - Guardian