William Golding’s profound tale of stranded youth, survival, and the shadowy depths of human nature

A Penguin Classic

At the dawn of the next World War, a plane crash strands a group of schoolboys on a remote island. There are no grownups. No rules. Freedom is celebrated. But when strange, distant noises and visions of a beast begin to haunt the boys, their fragile order unravels, and all hopes of rescue fade.

Since 1954, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies has shaped our understanding of human nature — the latent darkness within, and the destructive or creative capacity of collective will. This edition also includes essays on reading and teaching the novel, an introduction from the 1962 edition by E. M. Forster, and notes by E. L. Epstein, scholar and book editor of the first 1959 American paperback edition, to contextualize Golding’s classic as one of the most timeless and socially relevant texts in the last century of literature.

DETAILS • Author: William Golding • Publisher: Penguin Classics • Format: Paperback