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.

William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. "A stunning piece of writing as exciting as any thriller." - Frank Muir. Sunday Times. (from front cover)

The third volume of william goldings acclaimed sea trilogya decrepit warship sails on the last stretch of its voyage to sydney cove it has been blown off course and battered by wind, storm and ice nothing but rope holds the disintegrating hull together and after a risky operation to reset its foremast with red-hot metal, an unseen fire begins to smoulder below decks