Book description
'Powerful and provocative ... Each time I revisit The Inheritors I
find something new.' Penelope Lively This was a different voice; not
the voice of the people. It was the voice of other. When the spring
came the people moved back to their familiar home. But this year
strange things were happening - inexplicable sounds and smells;
unexpected acts of violence; and new, unimaginable creatures
half-glimpsed through the leaves. Seen through the eyes of a small
tribe of Neanderthals whose world is hanging in the balance, The
Inheritors explores the emergence of a new race - ourselves, Homo
sapiens - whose growing dominance threatens an entire way of life. 'An
earthquake in the petrified forest of the English novel.' Arthur
Koestler With a new introduction by John Carey
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.
