Listen free for 30 days

Preview

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo + applicable taxes after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Close Quarters

Written by: William Golding
Narrated by: William Golding
Try for $0.00

$14.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $39.47

Buy Now for $39.47

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Tax where applicable.

Publisher's Summary

Lose yourself in an epic naval journey in this Booker Prize-winning novel: the second in the acclaimed Sea Trilogy by the author of Lord of the Flies. Read by the author in 1989, this recording was re-mastered in 2022.

This tropical nowhere was the whole world - the whole imaginable world.

A decrepit warship is becalmed halfway to Australia, stilled in an ocean wilderness of heat and sea mists. In this surreal, fête-like atmosphere, a ball is held with a passing ship: the passengers dance and flirt, while beneath them seaweed like green hair spreads omniously over the hull. Half-mad with fear, drink, love and opium, both vessel and passengers feel themselves going to pieces: and the very planks seem to twist themselves alive as the ship comes apart at the seams . . .

'No living writer has represented the fragility of man's experience so marvellously as Golding.' AS Byatt

'It is in Golding's magnificent, therapeutic, terrifying descriptions of seascapes that the deepest meanings can be found.' Kate Mosse

'Stunning . . . As exciting as any thriller.' Sunday Times

'A feat of imaginative reconstruction, as vivid as a dream.' Daily Mail

'Tells an utterly absorbing tale, in language of immense force and subtlety.' Financial Times

To The Ends of the Earth: A Sea Trilogy - Book Two

©2013 William Golding (P)2022 Faber Audio
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about Close Quarters

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.