Rites of Passage: Introduced by Annie Proulx

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I grow a little crazy, I think, like all men at sea who live too close to each other and too close thereby to all that is monstrous under the sun and moon . . . Edmund Talbot is sailing to Australia in the early nineteenth century. In his journal, he records mounting tensions aboard the ancient, stinking warship, as officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants jostle in the cramped darkness below decks. But when something happens to Reverend Colley that brings him into a 'hell of self-degradation', it seems that shame is a force deadlier than the sea itself . . . 'It is the emotional veracity of life at sea that powers Golding's exceptional writing ... The fury, mystery and challenge.' - Kate Mosse 'A master at the full stretch of his age and wisdom - necessary, provoking, urgent, rich, complex and rare.' The Times To The Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy - Book One

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 Annie Proulx is a celebrated American author and journalist. Her novels include The Shipping News, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Fiction as well as being made into a major film in 2001, as well as Postcards, Accordion Crimes, That Old Ace in the Hole and Barkskins. Her short story 'Brokeback Mountain' was adapted into an award-winning motion picture in 2005. She lives in New Hampshire.

'Golding writes the past as present [with] uncanny skill and tremendous intuition.' - Ben Okri 'Golding's best and most accessible story since Lord of the Flies.' - Melvyn Bragg 'An extraordinary novel.' - Observer