The Inheritors

by William Golding

First published 1955

Amazon

3.9(725)

Lok and the small group he calls the people return to their seasonal home after winter, carrying fire, food memories and a shared understanding expressed as much through gesture and sensation as through speech. Their familiar route has changed, and signs of another people appear around the river crossing. These strangers possess boats, bows, stronger tools and forms of deception that Lok’s family cannot comprehend.

The encounter becomes catastrophic as members of the Neanderthal group disappear and Lok tries to recover a stolen child. Golding presents most of the story through Lok’s limited but intensely social consciousness, then shifts perspective to reveal how the newcomers have interpreted the Neanderthals. The novel makes human succession a tragedy of fear, misunderstanding and violence rather than a simple story of evolutionary progress.