Rites of Passage by William Golding [U.K. FIRST EDITION] 1980

Rites of Passage by William Golding

U.K. FIRST EDITION [1980] FABER & FABER [London]

SECOND IMPRESSION

Hardcover with clipped dust jacket in excellent condition.   Light shelf wear to jacket; book itself is in beautiful shape; pristine green cloth boards.  Some very faint discoloration to top of text block [see last photo.]   Reads as new!

Winner of the 1980 Booker Prize.  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.