The Inheritors

Hunt, trek, and feast among Neanderthals in this stunning novel by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies.



This was a different voice; not the voice of the people. It was the voice of other.

When spring comes, the people leave their winter cave, foraging for honey, grubs, and the hot richness of a deer's brain. They awaken the fire to heat their naked bodies, lay down their thorn bushes, and share pictures in their minds. But strange things are happening: inexplicable scents and sounds. Unimaginable beasts are half-glimpsed in the forest; upright creatures of bone-faces and deerskins. What the people don't know is that their day is already over ...

'Extraordinary ... Genius ... Remarkable in the literature of the twentieth century.' Ben Okri

'A stun gun to read ... Truly a masterpiece.' Monique Roffey

'An earthquake in the petrified forests of the English novel.' Arthur Koestler

'An astonishing, underrated novel.' Robert MacFarlane

'Beautiful, powerful ... A visionary dream . Shakespearean.' Ted Hughes

'A master fabulist, and a brilliantly creative interpreter of remote history ... An iconoclast.' John Fowles

'A tour de force ... Genius.' Daily Telegraph

'Alarming, eye-opening, desolating, mind-invading and unique.' New Statesman



William Golding (1911 - 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated in Marlborough and Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, lecturer, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and invasion of Holland.

Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers but rescued from the 'slush pile' at Faber and published in 1954. It became a modern classic selling millions of copies, translated into 35 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding wrote eleven other novels, a play and two essay collections.

He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in 1993. Recently, the

Times ranked Golding third on their list of the

50 greatest British writers since 1945. www.william-golding.co.uk