William Golding

Christopher Martin, the sole survivor of a torpedoed destroyer, is stranded upon a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Pitted against him are the sea, the sun, the night cold and the terror of his isolation. Meer

What the people do not know is that their day is already over . Meer

As his halo of hair grows wilder and his dark angel darker, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, watched over by the gargoyles - until the stone pillars shriek, the earth beneath creeps, and the spire's shadow falls like an axe on the medieval world below . Meer

Golding seduces us, transfixes, bewitches and confounds us.' Nicola Barker'The most powerful, and strangest, of all Golding's novels, and one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth-century. Meer