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Lord of the Flies, published in 1954, is Golding's best known work, selling over a milliion copies so far worldwide. John Carey's new biography William Golding is the first study of 'The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies'. Follow the link below to buy this book, first published by Faber & Faber in 2009, and now out in paperback.

Buy John Carey's definitive biography in paperback

In this frank and engaging family memoir, Judy Golding recalls growing up with a brilliant, loving, sometimes difficult parent. The years of her childhood and adolescence saw her father change from an impecunious schoolteacher to a famous novelist. Once adult, she came to understand some of the internal conflicts which led to his writing.

Buy Judy Golding's memoir Children of Lovers

Drawing almost entirely on materials that have never before been made public, John Carey, the distinguished writer and critic, sheds new light on Golding. Through hundreds of letters, unpublished works and Golding's intimate journals, Carey draws a revelatory and definitive portrait of an extraordinary man. In an absorbing and compelling narrative, he reveals a many-sided figure: a war-hero, a reclusive depressive who considered himself a 'monster', a family man, a victim of fears and phobias who battled against alcoholism, and a writer who trusted the imagination above all things.

Follow the link below to hear 'audio snippets' where Carey reads from his highly praised new biography.

William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies

To the Ends of the Earth is the 'Sea Trilogy' title for three of Golding's most gripping - and funniest - novels: Rites of Passage, Close Quarters, and Fire Down Below. BBC 2 broadcast a three-part television dramatisation of the trilogy in May-June 2005. The adaptation starred Benedict Cumberbatch, Sam Neill, Victoria Hamilton and Jared Harris, and was filmed partly in South Africa, near Capetown.

BBC TV adaptation of Golding's 'To the Ends of the Earth'

Golding's novel explores the encounter between Neanderthal humans and our species homo sapiens in a uniquely imaginative way. Recent work on the Neanderthal genome shows that it survives in some current populations and that 'we' are still a little bit 'them'.

Neanderthal links 'survive in us'.

Golding's novel of ambition and architecture is set in the English middle ages. His vision of faith, hubris, earthly lust and religious guilt is thought to have been inspired by his close inspection of the spire at Salisbury Cathedral near the boys' grammar school where he taught for many years.

Salisbury Cathedral

Martin Jarvis reads William Golding's classic novel in a major new unabridged recording. First published in 1954, Lord of the Flies is now recognized as a classic, one of the most celebrated of all modern novels.

Buy Lord of the Flies audio book

From the 1950s and later Golding travelled extensively in mainland Greece and in the Greek islands, imaginatively absorbed in the stony landscapes, classical ruins and wine-dark seas of Homer, the classical tragedians and historians, and the continuous culture of myth, symbolism and archetype of which he felt himself a part. He set his last novel, The Double Tongue, with characteristic wryness and self-conscious wit, at the oracle of Delphi after the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 B.C.E. His use of a female narrator - a pythia - gestured to the very borderline of reliability and unreliability. The oracle, whether frenzied or not, was well known for ambiguity. The Roman occupation perhaps mirrors Golding's own relationship to the 'lost' world of classical Greece - how to recreate truth and beauty in a later and more knowing age.

Alastair Sim and his wife Naomi gave the Goldings this brass butterfly door knocker as a memento of the joint efforts, and for many years it did faithful service on the door of their cottage home in the village of Bowerchalke, near Salisbury in Wiltshire, where the Goldings are buried in the churchyard. The knocker was retired from use when the Goldings moved to Cornwall in 1985.

Bowerchalke, near Salisbury, Wiltshire