Through its narrator's search for the point at which he lost his freedom - by implication, the freedom to be good - the novel strikes the reader most forcibly in its terrible demonstration of how we are born to hurt each other - and ourselves. A love story in which hate and cruelty play their parts, the narrative cycles back and forth through time in a series of spell-binding, concretely imagined episodes. "People are the walls of our room, not philosophies."

William Golding (1911-1993) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983.