#165 in Adventure
Lord of the Flies
- 248
- Pages
- about 4.5 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“Lord of the Flies” is as disturbing as its reputation promises. Golding leaves a group of young British boys on a deserted island and watches their attempt at self-rule fall apart. What surprises readers is how much they come to care about individual boys, which makes the slide into savagery harder to take. Brief and bleak, with a pessimistic view of what holds order together. Not for anyone wanting comfort, but hard to forget.
Worth knowing Golding’s first novel, published by Faber in 1954 after other publishers had turned it down; at Faber itself a first reader dismissed it before the young editor Charles Monteith championed it. Golding, then a schoolteacher, wrote it as a reply to the Victorian adventure The Coral Island, whose heroes Ralph and Jack lend their names here. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Lord of the Flies is the 1954 debut novel of British author William Golding. The plot concerns a group of prepubescent British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves that lead to a descent into savagery. The novel's themes include morality, leadership, and the tension between civility and chaos.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.3 across 4,422 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 97% of the weight and the score stays at 7.3 — the Adventure average of 7.8 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.3 | 395 | 9% |
| Google Books | 8.0 | 114 | 3% |
| Hardcover | 7.2 | 3.9K | 89% |
Frequently asked
What age is Lord of the Flies for?
Lord of the Flies sits on the Young adult shelf in the sources we use, which by convention means roughly ages 13 and up. This is a guide from the book’s category, not a publisher’s age rating. It has 248 pages — shorter than 86% of the ranked books in Adventure.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Adventure — with scores between 7.3 and 7.6, closest to this book.
