Free Fall - Hardcover

Golding, Sir William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0544310519 ISBN 13: 9780544310513

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2003

Synopsis

"I was standing up, pressed back against the wall, trying not to breathe. I got there in the one movement my body made. My body had many hairs on legs and belly and chest and head, and each had its own life; each inherited a hundred thousand years of loathing and fear for things that scuttle or slide or crawl." from Free Fall
Sammy Mountjoy, artist, rises from poverty and an obscure birth to see his pictures hung in the Tate Gallery. Swept into World War II, he is taken as a prisoner-of-war, threatened with torture, then locked in a cell of total darkness to wait. He emerges from his cell like Lazarus from the tomb, seeing infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. Transfigured by his ordeal, he begins to realize what man can be and what he has gradually made of himself through his own choices. He determines to find the exact point at which the accumulated weight of those choices has deprived him of free will.

About this title

Book Description:

Free Fall by William Golding - now with an introduction by John Gray - is a tale of war, incarceration and free will, from the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and author of Lord of the Flies.

About the Author:

William Golding (1911-1993) was a Booker and Nobel Prize-winning author, best known for his first novel, Lord of the Flies, published originally in 1954 and adapted for film in 1963. His other works include The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), The Spire (1964), Rites of Passage (1980), The Double Tongue (published posthumously in 1995) a now rare volume, Poems (1934) and the essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target.

Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before his writing career, Golding was a schoolmaster. He was also a keen actor, musician and small-boat sailor.

In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0544310519
• ISBN 13: 9780544310513
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 258