Rites of Passage

A Man Booker Prize Winning Title

By: William Golding

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Paperback | 1 July 2005 | Edition Number 1

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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, sinking 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.

Industry Reviews

Booker Prize Winner in 1980. In the cabin of an ancient, stinking warship which is bound for Australia from Britain in the 18th-century, a man writes a journal to entertain his godfather. With disdain and wit, he records the mounting tensions on board, as an obsequious clergyman attracts the animosity of the tyrannical captain and surly, brutalized crew. Men of god were often regarded as jonahs - that is, bringers of ill fortune - by superstitious seamen. It is the first of a trilogy which continues with 'Close Quarters' and concludes with 'The Fire Down Below'. Golding's own experience in the British Royal Navy during World War II contributed much to the atmosphere of these books, which have an acute sense of men living cheek by jowl, far from civilization. (Kirkus UK)

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