Christopher Martin, a naval officer, finds himself alone on a tiny rock in the middle of the Atlantic after his ship is struck. With little food, water or shelter, he fights to stay alive, relying on memory, cunning and a fierce will. As his days pass, his past comes back to him, and the reader learns what kind of man he has been. This is a tense, claustrophobic novel about survival and selfishness. It shows Golding's interest in the limits of the human mind under extreme pressure.
Quotes
Sleep is when all unsorted stuff comes as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
I will tell you what man is....He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out into the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there...