Ben Okri on the ‘resonance’ of The Inheritors

As part of the ‘Dead, Alive and Underrated’ series in The Times, the Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri is tasked with answering the three questions. In response to ‘what is your favourite book by an underrated author’, Okri replied with William Golding’s The Inheritors. He says that ‘this is a novel set far in the past, among Neanderthals, and yet has a curious resonance with our times’. While most readers have heard of Lord of the Flies, Okri believes that The Inheritors is the ‘greater achievement’.

Okri also wrote the Foreword to the most recent edition, published in the UK by Faber and Faber, and in the US by Penguin Classics.