Free Fall

“I could take whichever I would of these paths.”

A Penguin Classic

Sammy Mountjoy rises from poverty to become an acclaimed visual artist. He is then swept into World War II and somehow, somewhere, he loses his freedom—as a prisoner of war, through torture, undergoing captivity in total darkness. As he retraces his life, the narrative moves between England and a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. He begins to realize what man can be and what he has gradually made of himself through his own choices. But have those accumulated choices also deprived him of his free will?

After Lord of the Flies, William Golding wrote novels that further explored the complexities of human nature, not only social tendencies but the psychological underpinnings of human consciousness. This edition provides a Suggestions for Further Exploration section that identifies key themes throughout Golding’s novels—including Free Fall, first published in 1959—and connections to classic and contemporary fiction, nonfiction, film, and television.

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

William Golding (1911–1993) was born in Cornwall, England, and educated at Oxford University. His first book, Poems, was published in 1934. Following a stint in the Royal Navy and other activities during and after World War II, Golding wrote his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), while teaching school. Many novels followed, including The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), and The Spire (1964), as well as a play, The Brass Butterfly (1958), and a collection of shorter works, The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces (1965). He received the James Tait Black Prize for Darkness Visible (1979) and the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage (1980). In 1983, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today.” He was awarded the title “Companion of Literature” by the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988. William Golding died in June 1993 and is buried in Holy Trinity churchyard in Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, in England.

John Gray (introduction) is an English political philosopher and author. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.