Virgin Books

Synopsis

Presumed dead, a group of undergraduate students who go missing on a deserted Pacific island emerge one year later in two groups of ragged (and naked) survivors. All but one of the surviving women are pregnant, and two students, plus their professor, are said to have died. More disturbingly, a child that was born on the island to one of the girls has perished too. In the glare of the world’s media, every survivor sticks to the same unconvincing version of events.

Piece-by-piece the narrator examines the evidence and conducts interviews with the survivors, to work out exactly what happened on the island during that year. Slowly, a terrifying picture emerges of feral human beings stripped of dignity and resorting to the behaviour of warring primates. Rivalry and sexual tension leads to division, tribalism, perversion, rape, baby-snatching, and eventually murder ... a Lord of the Flies scenario for adults, proving the dead professor’s theory that human beings are no different from chimpanzees in the wild.

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