From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Rites of Passage |
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| Author: | William Golding |
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| Publisher: | Farrar Straus Giroux |
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In the early 1800s, Edmund Talbot, a young and rather priggish Englishman, takes passage on a boat heading for Australia where he is to be an official in the colonial government. In addition to Talbot, many of the eccentric passengers—a sexually predatory sailor, the aging coquette Miss Zenobia Brocklebank, the ship’s tyrannical captain—undergo profound changes in the course of the voyage, during which a naive clergyman is victimized and, finally, pushed to suicide. These events are described in the diary Talbot keeps en route.
