A 1954 novel by Nobel Prize winning British author William Golding. It tells the story of a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves. It tells the story of the boys' descent into savagery; left to themselves on a paradisiacal island, far from modern civilisation, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state. Golding wrote his book as a counterpoint to R.M. Ballantyne's youth novel The Coral Island.