Lord of the Flies

A group of British schoolboys, evacuated from wartime England and stranded on an uninhabited tropical island, attempt to organise themselves into a functional society. They elect a leader, assign roles, establish rules. And within weeks, the society has collapsed into savagery — not because the boys are particularly bad, but because Golding believes that savagery is not an aberration of human nature but one of its fundamental possibilities, always present beneath the social conventions that ordinarily contain it.

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies has been one of the most taught and most debated novels in the English-speaking world since its publication in 1954. Its images — the conch, the beast, Piggy’s spectacles, the final scene on the beach — have become part of the cultural vocabulary of the twentieth century.

One of the essential British novels — the Faber & Faber edition with an introduction that places the novel in its historical and literary context. Published by Faber & Faber.