The long-standing correspondence bet-ween William Golding and his editor at Faber & Faber, Charles Monteith, provides us with a glimpse into the mind of one of the 20th century’s great novelists. It also provides us with lots of information about Golding’s many holidays with his wife, Ann, the purchase of a new piano, builders working on the house, the new house, dinners at All Souls, club lunches in London – the usual super-successful-writer stuff. ‘Your accounts dept keeps sending us incredible quantities of money,’ writes Golding, who by his own admission had a keen eye for ‘who gets what’: ‘I like it so much, and can only hope you’ll keep it up.’

Scrupulously edited by Tim Kendall and drawing on public and private archives, William Golding: The Faber Letters is a dense but rewarding survey of a forty-year professional relationship, from Monteith’s famous rescue of Lord of the Flies from the slush pile in the early 1950s to Golding’s later golden years as Nobel laureate and knight of the realm.

There is less of the mythic genius at work in these letters than there is of the often fretful labour of writing: the endless drafts, the blunders and rejections, the mistrust of one’s own talent and the compensatory thrills of commerce, editing, celebrity and friendship. The story it tells is