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Synopsis
With an introduction by John Gray
Sammy Mountjoy, artist, rises from poverty and an obscure birth to see his pictures hung in the Tate Gallery. Swept into World War II, he is taken as a prisoner-of-war, threatened with torture, then locked in a cell of total darkness to wait. He emerges from his cell transfigured from his ordeal, and begins to realise what man can be and what he has gradually made of himself through his own choices. But did those accumulated choices also begin to deprive him of his free will?
'A fiercely distinguished book.' Frank Kermode
'It is one of those rare books that should be read by people who don't normally read novels at all. It will stand, I belive, as one of those books against which other books are measures.' Tribune
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From the Back Cover
"I was standing up, pressed back against the wall, trying not to breathe. I got there in the one movement my body made. My body had many hairs on legs and belly and chest and head, and each had its own life; each inherited a hundred thousand years of loathing and fear for things that scuttle or slide or crawl." from Free Fall
Sammy Mountjoy, artist, rises from poverty and an obscure birth to see his pictures hung in the Tate Gallery. Swept into World War II, he is taken as a prisoner-of-war, threatened with torture, then locked in a cell of total darkness to wait. He emerges from his cell like Lazarus from the tomb, seeing infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. Transfigured by his ordeal, he begins to realize what man can be and what he has gradually made of himself through his own choices. He determines to find the exact point at which the accumulated weight of those choices has deprived him of free will.
Born in Cornwall, England, William Golding started writing at the age of seven. Though he studied natural sciences at Oxford to please his parents, he also studied English and published his first book, a collection of poems, before finishing college. He served in the Royal Navy during World War II, participating in the Normandy invasion. Golding's other novels include Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, The Spire, Rites of Passage (Booker Prize), and The Double Tongue.
About the Author
William Golding (1911-1993) was a Booker and Nobel Prize-winning author, best known for his first novel, Lord of the Flies, published originally in 1954 and adapted for film in 1963. His other works include The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), The Spire (1964), Rites of Passage (1980), The Double Tongue (published posthumously in 1995) a now rare volume, Poems (1934) and the essay collections The Hot Gates and A Moving Target.
Golding was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before his writing career, Golding was a schoolmaster. He was also a keen actor, musician and small-boat sailor.
In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
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- PublisherFaber & Faber
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 0571298516
- ISBN 13 9780571298518
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages304
- Rating
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Free Fall : With an Introduction by John Gray
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Faber & Faber, Incorporated, 2013
ISBN 10: 0571298516
ISBN 13: 9780571298518
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Condition: Very Good. Sammy Mountjoy, artist, rises from poverty and an obscure birth to see his pictures hung in the Tate Gallery. Swept into World War Two, he is taken as a prisoner-of-war, threatened with torture, then locked in a cell of total darkness to wait. He emerges from his cell transfigured from his ordeal, and begins to realise what man can be. Num Pages: 304 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 198 x 126 x 20. Weight in Grams: 236. Faber & Faber, 1959; 1st edn. unglazed paper dust cover, designed by Anthony Gross, has 3 small closed tears, else very fine; red cloth binding and contents in mint condition; The jacket blurb: With three novels all published since 1954? Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin?William Golding has already established for himself a place in English literature which seems likely to be permanent. His originality and inventiveness, his profound intelligence, his passionate concern with the human condition, are fused with purely literary gifts of the highest order?narrative power, the ability to convey with precision the feel and texture of both the interior and the exterior world, a prose style of which the distinction is unmistakable. Mr. Golding has placed his previous novels on a desert island inhabited only by air-wrecked schoolboys, in the prehistoric world of the Neanderthals, on an isolated crag in mid-Atlantic. There has been considerable speculation about where he would turn to next. Free Fall is set in England and in a prisoner^ of-war camp in Germany. The time is the present. Sammy Mountjoy, its narrator and central character, is a distinguished painter; and he is, too, a bastard born in a rural slum who was taken up by the vicar (by no means an ordinary vicar), became an art student and flirted with Communism in the thirties, fell in love with one girl and seduced her, fell in love with another and married her, and in a German P.O.W. camp experienced the blackness of the Pit. And somehow, somewhere, he had irrevocably lost his freedom?the power to choose and decide, the faculty of freewill 'that cannot be debated but only experienced, like a colour or the taste of potatoes'. How did he lose it? And why? In agonized speculation he traces back the threads that promise a way out of the labyrinth, but one after another they snap in his hands. But for the reader the broken threads are woven together into a pattern of one man's life. Free Fall, in its richness of characterization, its immediacy and impact, its reverberating overtones, is perhaps the most important and most moving novel that Mr. Golding has yet given us. 254pp; 7¾x5". 2013. Main. Paperback. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland. Seller Inventory # KEB0000766
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