The Inheritors

Hunt, trek, and feast among Neanderthals in this stunning vision of prehistory on the cusp of a new age, from the radical Nobel Laureate and author of Lord of the Flies, introduced by Ben Okri.
This was a different voice; not the voice of the people. It was the voice of other.
When spring comes, the people leave their winter cave, foraging for honey and shoots, bulbs and grubs, the hot richness of a deer's brain. They awaken the fire to heat their naked bodies, lay down their thorn bushes, and share pictures in their minds.
But strange things are happening - inexplicable scents, sounds, and violence - and, suddenly, unimaginable creatures are half-glimpsed in the forest; an upright new people of bone-faces and deerskins. What the early people don't know is that their season is already over ...
'An earthquake in the petrified forests of the English novel.' Arthur Koestler
'A tour de force ... Genius.' Daily Telegraph
'Alarming, eye-opening, desolating, mind-invading and unique.' New Statesman
'Powerful and provocative ... Each time I revisit The Inheritors I find something new.' Penelope Lively

William Golding (1911 - 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated in Marlborough and Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, lecturer, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and invasion of Holland. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers but rescued from the 'slush pile' at Faber and published in 1954. It became a modern classic selling millions of copies, translated into 35 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding wrote eleven other novels, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in 1993. Recently, the Times ranked Golding third on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. william-golding.co.uk
Nigerian-born poet and author Ben Okri is the author of eight novels, including his Booker-Prize-winning novel The Famished Road as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays, translated into more than 20 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won numerous international prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Chianti Rufino-Antico Fattore. He is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN and was awarded the OBE in 2001.