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To the Ends of the Earth Series

Embark on a captivating voyage to the early 19th century, where adventure, tension, and social commentary intertwine. Follow the lives aboard a warship teeming with diverse characters, from officers to emigrants, and explore the darker aspects of human nature within confined spaces. These narratives delve into themes of honor, shame, and the struggle for survival against both the perilous sea and inner demons.

Darkness Visible
Close Quarters
Rites of passage

Recommended Reading Order

  1. Rites of passage

    • 288 pages
    • 11 hours of reading

    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.

    Rites of passage1
    3.6

  2. Close Quarters

    • 288 pages
    • 11 hours of reading

    In a wilderness of heat, stillness and sea mists, a ball is held on a ship becalmed halfway to Australia. In this surreal, fecirc;te-like atmosphere the passengers dance and flirt, while beneath them thickets of weed like green hair spread over the hull. The sequel to Rites of Passage, Close Quarters, the second volume in Golding's acclaimed sea trilogy, is imbued with his extraordinary sense of menace. Half-mad with fear, with drink, with love and opium, everyone on this leaky, unsound hulk is 'going to pieces'. And in a nightmarish climax the very planks seem to twist themselves alive as the ship begins to come apart at the seams.

    Close Quarters2
    3.9

  3. Darkness Visible

    • 265 pages
    • 10 hours of reading

    A reissue of the tour de force by the Nobel laureate that is a vision of elemental reality so vivid we seem to hallucinate the scenes (The New York Times Book Review). It opens during the London blitz, when a naked child steps out of an all-consuming fire; that child, Matty, becomes a wanderer and a seeker. Two more lost children await him, twins as exquisite as they are loveless. In a final conflagration, William Golding' s book lights up both the inner and outer darknesses of our time.

    Darkness Visible3
    3.4