Three short novels show Golding at his playful, ironic and mysterious best. In The Scorpion God we see the world of ancient Egypt at the time of the earliest pharaohs. Clonk Clonk is a graphic account of a crippled youth's triumph over his tormentors in a primitive matriarchal society. And Envoy Extraordinary is a tale of Imperial Rome where the emperor loves his illegitimate grandson more than his own arrogant, loutish heir.
'The writing is brilliant, so fluent and stylish that the stories read themselves like a dream.' Daily Telegraph
'As ambitious and as engrossing as the best of Golding.' Financial Times
About the Author
William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, and also took part in the pursuit of the Bismarck. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Welcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993. The Double Tongue, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.