Inheritors
Hunt, trek, and feast among Neanderthals in this stunning novel by the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies, introduced by Ben Okri.
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. Imaginable beasts are half-glimpsed in the forest; upright creatures of bone-faces and deerskins. What the people do not 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
'I admire Golding pushing beyond his own experiences to explore ancient worlds and altered states of consciousness.' Rose Tremain
William Golding (1911 - 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and liberation of Holland. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers but rescued from the 'reject pile' at Faber and published in 1954. It became a modern classic selling millions of copies, translated into 44 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. www.william-golding.co.uk
Ben Okri (1959 -) is a poet, novelist and playwright. He is the author of ten celebrated novels including The Famished Road, which won the 1991 Booker Prize, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays, which have been translated into over 26 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won numerous international prizes. In 2019, Astonishing the Gods was named as one of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World.' He is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN and an Honorary Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. He lives in London.