Rites of Passage

william golding

The first volume of William Golding's Sea Trilogy.

Sailing to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back in England. Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient, stinking warship where officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants jostle in the cramped spaces below decks. Then a single passenger, the obsequious Reverend Colley, attracts the animosity of the sailors, and in the seclusion of the fo'castle something happens to bring him into a 'hell of degradation', where shame is a force deadlier than the sea itself.

Genres fictionhistorical fictionclassicsnobel prizeliteraturehistoricalliterary fictionbritish literaturenovels20th century

278 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1980

Series

To the Ends of the Earth

Literary awards

booker prize,

This edition

Format: 278 pages, Paperback
Published: January 1, 2001 by Faber and Faber
ISBN: 9780571209439
ASIN: 0571209432
Language: English

Characters More characters

About the author

william golding

Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he published another twelve volumes of fiction in his lifetime. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. He was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a result of his contributions to literature, Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".