An astonishing, heart-rending tour de force' Pat Barker The Abomination chronicles the life of Santiago Moore Zamora, a young man born to a beautiful, emotionally distant Spanish mother and an austere English father. Adrift in a world of nameless one night stands, living in a London of suffocating hedonism he remembers his early years in Spain and sudden exile to boarding school in England where two proscribed love affairs set him on a course apart. 'Golding's tale is no simple fable of innocence lost or trust abused; rather, it is a chilling dissection of inexorable, irreversible alienation . . . This unflinching novel deserves to be read' Guardian 'This is an accomplished first novel . . . stylish, clever, experimental, ambitious, urbane' TLS ' The Abomination is astonishingly assured; the strongest debut since The Swimming-Pool Library' Independent