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Episode details

Radio 3,23 Dec 2019,14 mins

SeriesOpen Endings

Ian Rankin on Lord of the Flies

The Essay

Available for over a year

Five leading writers pick a novel they love and then write an original piece of fiction imagining what happened to the characters after the story ends. In the first essay of the series, the crime writer Ian Rankin picks William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Like many students, Ian first encountered the novel at school but certain scenes and moments have stayed with him for the past 40 years. In this essay, Ian explores his relationship with the work as a teenager of the 1970s and imagines what might have happened to two of the shipwrecked boys, Ralph and Jack, once they reach adulthood. Producer: Camellia Sinclair

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