The Sound and the Fury

On April 7, 1928, Quentin Compson is in his room at Harvard. He is thinking about time. And he is going to kill himself before the day is over. But before we reach that day, we must first pass through the consciousness of Benjy — a thirty-three-year-old man who cannot speak, cannot distinguish past from present, and experiences the entire story of his family’s destruction as a single, simultaneous, agonising moment.

The Sound and the Fury is William Faulkner’s masterpiece — and by many measures, the greatest American novel of the twentieth century. Its four-part structure, its radical experiments with time and consciousness, its portrait of a Southern aristocratic family in the grip of collapse: together these form a work of overwhelming power and technical brilliance that permanently expanded what fiction could be.

This is not an easy novel. It demands patience, re-reading, and complete surrender. What it gives in return is an experience unlike anything else in literature: the sensation of another consciousness from the inside, the devastation of a family and a world gone wrong, and the terrible beauty of language pushed to its absolute limits. Prepare to be changed. Published by Vintage.