Lord of the Flies

A group of English schoolboys is stranded on an uninhabited tropical island after a plane crash during wartime. With no adults to guide them, they try to organise themselves, choosing a leader, keeping a signal fire and sharing out tasks. Gradually the fragile order is tested by fear, rivalry and the lure of hunting and power. Ralph, Piggy and Jack represent competing ideas of how to live together. Golding's short novel is a sharp fable about civilisation and its thin hold on human behaviour. It remains one of the most widely read and discussed English novels of the twentieth century.