Recommendations
Books Like Lord of the Flies
What to read after Lord of the Flies by William Golding
William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) is one of the most widely read novels about human nature — British schoolboys on an island whose democracy collapses into tribalism and violence. If you were drawn to its dark view of what happens without civilization's constraints, its allegory of political order and its fragility, and its compressed intensity, these novels offer the same seriousness.
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1984
by George Orwell
The most important twentieth-century novel about what civilization becomes when fear and power replace consent — Orwell and Golding were roughly contemporary and both grappling with the same post-WWII question: what did the war teach us about what human beings are?
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Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
A future society that controls its citizens through pleasure rather than fear — the opposite of Lord of the Flies in form (organized society rather than its collapse) but the same underlying question: what would it mean for civilization to succeed completely?
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The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
A man and his son after an apocalypse, walking south — the same meditation as Golding on what remains of humanity when civilization is gone; McCarthy's answer is more hopeful in one sense and more brutal in another
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The Inheritors
by William Golding
Golding's second novel — Neanderthals displaced by the arrival of Homo sapiens; the inverse of Lord of the Flies in that the 'savages' are the innocent ones and the 'civilized' are the destroyers; a natural companion to Lord of the Flies
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Battle Royale
by Koushun Takami
A Japanese thriller in which a class of ninth-graders are sent to an island and required to kill each other until one survivor remains — the direct Japanese counterpart to Lord of the Flies, darker and more overtly political; the structural template for The Hunger Games
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We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
The 1924 Russian ancestor of all dystopian fiction — the One State, the glass apartments, the rebellion that fails; the same question as Lord of the Flies about what civilization actually is and what it suppresses
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The Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins
The dystopia that Koushun Takami's Battle Royale inspired through Lord of the Flies: children forced to fight each other for the entertainment of the ruling class; less philosophically serious than Golding but asking the same question about what societies do with their children
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Alive
by Piers Paul Read
The true account of the Andes flight disaster of 1972 — a Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashes in the Andes and who survive for seventy-two days by eating the flesh of the dead; the real-world test of Golding's thesis, with a very different answer
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