A school-text classic, yes, but still one of the cleanest little horror machines in twentieth-century fiction.

A group of boys are stranded on an island after a crash, and their attempt to organise themselves into rules, meetings, shelters, rescue fires and little democratic procedures slowly gives way to fear, ritual, violence and the much less comforting idea that civilisation is thinner than everyone would like to believe.

Golding’s trick is that the book remains both blunt and slippery: an adventure story, a moral fable, a political allegory, a study of group psychology, a nightmare about masculinity, and a classroom staple that is actually much stranger and darker than its institutional afterlife sometimes suggests.

Penguin Modern Classics paperback. First published by Faber & Faber in 1954; first published in Penguin in 1960, with this copy showing reprint history through 1967. Vintage second-hand condition, with visible rubbing, edgewear, creasing and age-toning to pages and cover.