A tour de force by the Nobel laureate that is a vision of elemental reality so vivid we seem to hallucinate the scenes (The New York Times Book Review). It opens during the London blitz, when a naked child steps out of an all-consuming fire; that child, Matty, becomes a wanderer and a seeker. Two more lost children await him, twins as exquisite as they are loveless. In a final conflagration, William Golding' s book lights up both the inner and outer darknesses of our time.