Free Fall - Hardcover

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.

Sammy Mountjoy, son of a slattern, child of London's Rotten Row, looks back on his life seeking forgiveness, needing to forgive. Somehwere he ceased being the object of circumstance and became the subject. And in becoming the mover, attaining freedom, he irrevocably lost freedom. For as a child, subject to nightmares, clamoring at the pub door for his mother, accepting blows from the prim spinster teacher, learning "security" from the clergyman who adopted him, the young painter was free. But as the lover of a simple lower class woman whom he betrayed or of Taffy for whom he lusted and married, he was not free, but driven by the world of objective reality into a nightmare of grasping and destruction. And as a prisoner in a concentration camp, close to mental and physical death, the whole terrifying pattern of his existence reveals itself in a symphonic form. Themes are introduced, slowly, logically, until at the climax they merge, and Sammy, who knows that within him lies a dark force that bids him live, stands at the pinnacle of reality, a reality that embraces two worlds which will never be reconciled. Written by the author of Lord of the Flies, this chronicle of a modern man is reminiscent of Kafka. For here is a thematic novel of existence in which humor is filled with horror and order is the mask that chaos wears. Recommended for readers who seek more than entertainment from fiction. (Kirkus Reviews )