William Golding won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983. His first novel, Lord of the Flies, is probably his best known work.

Pincher Martin is on a navy vessel escorting a North Atlantic convoy during WWII. His ship is torpedoed and sinks, but Martin is the sole survivor and ends up on a rock on his own in the middle of the ocean. The book is entirely set on this rock.

He is exposed and isolated surrounded by the sea, the sun, the cold and his evident isolation. He is injured, he is hungry, but it’s his thoughts that are the most terrifying as he remembers incidents from his past that he regrets and perhaps wishes he’d handled differently. He organises a pool of rainwater for drinking and eats shellfish which give him food poisoning. He gives names to features of the rock to make it homely, but there’s no escape from himself.