Reading List

Authors Like William Golding

William Golding began Lord of the Flies in 1951, while he was teaching at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, and wrote much of it by hand in the classroom while his pupils worked. He had spent the war in the Royal Navy and taken part in the D-Day landings. The manuscript, then called Strangers from Within, was turned down by more than twenty publishers, and a reader at Faber marked it “Rubbish & dull. Pointless.” before a new editor, Charles Monteith, pulled it from the pile, cut it and renamed it; Faber published it in September 1954. Golding went on to write The Inheritors, The Spire and the sea trilogy that opens with Rites of Passage, which won the Booker Prize in 1980; he won the Nobel Prize in 1983, and in 2026 the BBC adapted Lord of the Flies for television for the first time, in four parts written by Jack Thorne. Readers come to him for one idea held without flinching: that order is something people make and can lose, and that the darkness is in us, not out in the jungle. The writers below share that subject — what is left of people when the rules come off — and most of them, like Golding, use a simple premise to make it.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Human nature · Dystopia · Children without adults · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love William Golding, start with George Orwell, whose Animal Farm is the other great English fable of power. For children who turn out to be the danger, read John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos and Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden. For the cruelty of ordinary people, Shirley Jackson. And for Golding's bleakness taken all the way, Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

10 authors like William Golding

01
The other English fable · Closest match

George Orwell

English · b. 1903 · Novelist and essayist

Orwell, the pen name of Eric Blair, fought with the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War and was shot through the throat in 1937; Homage to Catalonia (1938) records how Stalinist forces turned on their own side. Animal Farm, a fable of a revolution on an English farm going bad, followed in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. He died in London in January 1950.

Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies are the two short English fables of the post-war years that everyone reads at school, and they make the same argument from opposite ends: a small society sets up rules, the strongest learn to bend them, and the decent are left behind. Orwell blames power and the system; Golding blames something older in people themselves. Read them back to back.

— Lisanne

Every book by George Orwell →

02
Mid-century England under strain

John Wyndham

English · b. 1903 · Novelist

Wyndham, born John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris in Birmingham, wrote pulp science fiction as John Beynon in the 1930s before The Day of the Triffids (1951) made his name. The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos followed through the 1950s. The Midwich Cuckoos, about a village where every woman gives birth to a golden-eyed child, was filmed in 1960 as Village of the Damned.

Wyndham and Golding were writing in the same England in the same decade, and both took a calm, ordinary setting — a village, a school party — and removed the floor. The Day of the Triffids is about how fast a society reorganises around force once it breaks down; The Midwich Cuckoos is about children who are not what the adults hoped. He is plainer and more cheerful than Golding, but the question is the same.

— Lisanne

Every book by John Wyndham →

03
The other way a society fails

Aldous Huxley

English · b. 1894 · Novelist and essayist

Huxley published Brave New World in 1932: a world state that keeps its citizens content with engineered birth, conditioning and a drug called soma. He moved to California in 1937 and turned to mysticism and, later, mescaline, recorded in The Doors of Perception (1954). His last novel, Island (1962), imagines a good society on a remote island and lets the outside world destroy it.

Golding's island falls apart through violence; Huxley's world holds together through comfort, and the cost is the same — people stop being fully human. Brave New World is the complement to Lord of the Flies rather than its copy. And Island, his utopia, is worth reading after Golding as the hopeful island novel, with an ending Golding would have recognised.

— Lisanne

Every book by Aldous Huxley →

04
The darkness of man's heart

Joseph Conrad

Polish-British · b. 1857 · Novelist

Conrad went to sea at sixteen and served in the British merchant marine from 1878, rising to captain, before publishing his first novel, Almayer's Folly, in 1895. Heart of Darkness follows Marlow up the Congo River in search of Kurtz, an ivory agent who has thrown off every restraint. Chinua Achebe's 1975 lecture “An Image of Africa” argued that it is a racist book, and that debate is now part of reading it.

The ancestor. Lord of the Flies ends with Ralph weeping for “the darkness of man's heart”, and Conrad is where that idea comes from in English fiction: a civilised European cut off from the rules, and what he turns out to be. Conrad is denser and slower, but both writers treat the wilderness as a mirror, not a place.

— Lisanne
Every book by Joseph Conrad →
05
Youth and violence · Golding's Booker rival

Anthony Burgess

English · b. 1917 · Novelist

Burgess, born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester, was also a composer. A Clockwork Orange (1962) is narrated by Alex, a teenage gang leader in a near-future England, in an invented Russian-flavoured slang; Stanley Kubrick filmed it in 1971. Earthly Powers was shortlisted for the 1980 Booker Prize and lost to Golding's Rites of Passage; Burgess did not attend the ceremony.

The other English novel every school hands to teenagers about teenagers. Where Golding asks what boys become without adults, Burgess asks what adults may do to a violent boy to make him good, and whether a goodness that is not chosen counts. He is louder and more playful with language, but the moral argument is as serious as Golding's.

— Lisanne
06
A city coming apart

Doris Lessing

British · b. 1919 · Novelist · Nobel 2007

Lessing (1919–2013) was born in Persia, grew up on a farm in Southern Rhodesia and moved to London in 1949. The Golden Notebook became a touchstone of the women's movement. In The Memoirs of a Survivor a woman watches a city break down from her flat window, and from 1979 to 1983 she published the five-novel science fiction sequence Canopus in Argos. She won the Nobel Prize in 2007.

The Memoirs of a Survivor is the novel to read after Lord of the Flies if you want the same collapse seen from an adult's window: the young people of the city drifting into gangs with their own rules while the older world stops working. Lessing is more patient and more inward than Golding, and less certain that what comes next is only worse.

— Lisanne

Every book by Doris Lessing →

07
Cruelty in ordinary people

Shirley Jackson

American · b. 1916 · Novelist and story writer

“The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker on 28 June 1948 and drew hundreds of letters, many of them angry or bewildered. Jackson went on to write The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), and died in 1965 at the age of 48.

Jackson needs no island. “The Lottery” does in a few pages what Lord of the Flies does in a novel: it shows ordinary, likeable people taking part in a killing because the group has made it normal. Golding uses boys and a jungle; Jackson uses neighbours and a village square, which is worse.

— Lisanne
08
Children left alone

Ian McEwan

English · b. 1948 · Novelist · Booker 1998

McEwan's first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), is about four children who, after their mother dies, bury her in cement in the cellar so they will not be taken into care. Amsterdam won the Booker Prize in 1998, and Atonement (2001) was shortlisted. In 2006 he was accused of plagiarism over passages in Atonement echoing Lucilla Andrews' memoir No Time for Romance, which he had acknowledged as a source; writers including Ishiguro, Atwood and Pynchon defended him.

The Cement Garden is Lord of the Flies moved into a suburban house: children with no adults, inventing their own rules and drifting past every line they were taught. It is quieter, stranger and more disturbing in its own way. Start there, and go to Atonement for a novel about a child's mistake and what it does to everyone after.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ian McEwan →

09
The school as a closed world

Kazuo Ishiguro

British · b. 1954 · Novelist · Nobel 2017

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England with his family when he was five. The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989. Never Let Me Go (2005), shortlisted for the Booker, follows three friends from Hailsham, an English boarding school whose pupils slowly learn what they were raised for. He won the Nobel Prize in 2017.

Never Let Me Go is the other great English novel about children in a world of their own, and the inverse of Golding's: no one breaks the rules, and that is the horror. Where Golding shows what boys do when the adults vanish, Ishiguro shows what adults do to children who never question them. Both books end with a judgement on the grown-ups.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kazuo Ishiguro →

10
The bleakest descendant

Cormac McCarthy

American · b. 1933 · Novelist · Pulitzer 2007

Blood Meridian (1985) follows a scalp-hunting gang through the borderlands of the 1840s and 1850s. The Road, about a father and son walking south through a burned America after an unnamed catastrophe, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007; he died in Santa Fe in June 2023. After his death Vanity Fair published Augusta Britt's account of a relationship with McCarthy that began in 1976, when she was 16 and he was 42.

If Golding's question is what people become when the rules go, The Road is the answer given at full darkness: most have become what Jack's hunters were becoming. But McCarthy also gives the thing Golding withholds — a child who stays good — which makes The Road both bleaker and more tender than Lord of the Flies.

— Lisanne

Every book by Cormac McCarthy →

Where to start if you loved William Golding

If you want the same argument as a fable, read George Orwell.

Animal Farm: a small society, its rules, and who bends them.

If you want children without adults, read Ian McEwan.

The Cement Garden: Lord of the Flies in a suburban house.

If you want the cruelty without the island, read Shirley Jackson.

“The Lottery” — a village, a tradition, a stone.

If you want it at its darkest, read Cormac McCarthy.

The Road: after the collapse, with one child who stays good.

Frequently asked questions about authors like William Golding

Who should I read if I love William Golding?

George Orwell first: Animal Farm is the other short English fable of power from the same years. For children who become the danger, read John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos and Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden. Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery” shows the same cruelty in ordinary adults, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road takes Golding's view of human nature to its bleakest point.

What books are like Lord of the Flies?

The closest are Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden (1978), about children living alone after their mother's death; John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957); Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962); and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005), another English novel about children in a closed world. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the older book behind its central idea.

Why did Golding write Lord of the Flies?

He began it in 1951 while teaching at a boys' school in Salisbury, after serving in the Royal Navy through the Second World War, including the D-Day landings. The novel answers the Victorian castaway story, R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island, in which British boys on an island behave admirably: Golding borrows the names Ralph and Jack, and the naval officer who rescues his boys compares them to it.

Is Lord of the Flies realistic?

Golding's novel is a fable, not a study. The best-known real case points the other way: in 1965 six Tongan schoolboys were shipwrecked on the island of ‘Ata and survived for more than a year by working together, until Peter Warner found them in 1966. Rutger Bregman retold their story in Humankind (2020) as an answer to Golding.

Did William Golding win the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize?

Both. Rites of Passage won the Booker Prize in 1980, beating Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, and Golding won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in Cornwall in June 1993.

Is there a controversy about William Golding?

Yes. In 2009 material from John Carey's authorised biography revealed that Golding's unpublished memoir, written for his wife, describes him trying to rape a girl he knew in Marlborough, reported as 15, when he was 18 and a first-year student at Oxford.

Is there a new Lord of the Flies adaptation?

Yes. In 2026 the BBC broadcast the first television adaptation, a four-part series written by Jack Thorne, with each episode centred on one boy: Piggy, Jack, Simon and Ralph. In the United States it is on Netflix.

Footnotes

  1. Lord of the Flies almost never got published — Smithsonian Magazine
  2. About William Golding — William Golding Ltd
  3. Golding 'tried to rape a 15-year-old girl' — History News Network
  4. Burgess's Booker Prize nomination — International Anthony Burgess Foundation
  5. The Real Lord of the Flies — ExplorersWeb
  6. John Wyndham — Britannica
  7. Shirley Jackson — New World Encyclopedia
  8. Ian McEwan — British Council Literature

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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