Book description
Drowning in the freezing North Atlantic, Christopher Hadley Martin,
temporary lieutenant, happens upon a grotesque rock, an island that
appears only on weather charts. To drink there is a pool of rain
water; to eat there are weeds and sea anemones. Through the long
hours with only himself to talk to, Martin must try to assemble the
truth of his fate, piece by terrible piece.
From the author of Lord of the Flies, Pincher Martin
is a terrifying and unforgettable journey into one man's mind.
'The utmost inventiveness, assurance and power ... Nor reader will
soon forget the world it reveals.' Kingsley Amis
'Like a cold sweat, a day-mare, or going under gas... Prose more
tightly packed, more jaggedly concrete, I can't imagine; and the
shock ending ... is technical wizardry of the first order.' Kenneth
Tynan, Observer
'Remarkably sustained imaginative intensity.' TLS
William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at
Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he
became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor
and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In
1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships,
submarines and aircraft. He was present at the sinking of the
Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket
ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later
at the island of Welcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop
Wordsworth's School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel,
Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching
in 1961. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963.
Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and
classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects
appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving
Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of
Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of
1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death,
was published in June 1995.
