Lord of the Flies - (Penguin Classics Hardcover) by William Golding (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

For the 70th anniversary of William Golding's classic, the first graphic novel adaptation of Lord of the Flies

A Penguin Classic

The well-known plot: A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. By day, they explore the dazzling beaches, gorging fruit, seeking shelter, and ripping off their uniforms to swim in the lagoon. At night, in the darkness of the jungle, they are haunted by nightmares of a primitive beast. Orphaned by society, they must forge their own; but it isn't long before their innocent games devolve into a murderous hunt ...
William Golding's Lord of the Flies was originally published in 1954 and has been a canonical text on school syllabi and a familiar literary reference within the public's consciousness. For the first time this unforgettable classic has been given new life with Aimée de Jongh's graphic style and gorgeous color adaptation, created in close collaboration with the Golding family.

Review Quotes

"Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite books. I still read it every couple of years."
--Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games trilogy

"I finished the last half of Lord of the Flies in a single afternoon, my eyes wide, my heart pounding, not thinking, just inhaling....My rule of thumb as a writer and reader--largely formed by Lord of the Flies--is feel it first, think about it later."
--Stephen King

"This brilliant work is a frightening parody on man's return [in a few weeks] to that state of darkness from which it took him thousands of years to emerge. Fully to succeed, a fantasy must approach very close to reality. Lord of the Flies does. It must also be superbly written. It is."
--The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

William Golding (1911 - 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and liberation of Holland. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers but rescued from the "reject pile" at Faber and published in 1954. It became a modern classic selling millions of copies, translated into 44 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding wrote eleven other novels, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in 1993.

Aimée de Jongh is an Eisner-nominated comic author and animator from the Netherlands. At the age of 22, Aimée's career in comics took off with the popular daily series Snippers for the Dutch newspaper Metro. At 25, she then published her first graphic novel The Return of the Honey Buzzard, which won the Prix Saint-Michel and was adapted to a live-action film. Her international breakthrough came when Blossoms in Autumn was released, a graphic novel about elderly love, written by Belgian comic author Zidrou. In 2019, Aimée published her autobiographical comic TAXI!, about four intriguing taxi rides she made. Aimée's most well known graphic novel is the award winning and Eisner nominated Days of Sand (Jours de Sable).