Is Lord of the Flies Clean? Profanity and Content Guide for the Audiobook

Golding's novel about schoolboys stranded on an island is assigned reading for a lot of kids, so it is worth knowing what is actually in it before the syllabus arrives. The short answer is violence. Our reviewers tagged 47 violence moments that add up to about eight minutes, most of them mild or moderate, with three severe scenes that are each under twenty seconds. The book's darkness comes from where the story goes rather than from long graphic passages, and the tags reflect that. Language is light and very British: twenty profanity moments, mostly mild schoolboy insults, a couple of moderate ones, and five mild blasphemies. There is no sexual content, no slurs, and only a single second of crude humor. All told, about eight minutes come out of a six and a half hour book. This is the author's own reading, so with filters on you get the original, cleaned up, in Golding's own voice. I'd hand this to a teenager reading it for class with no filters at all, since the violence is the point of the book and the language barely registers. For a younger or sensitive reader, switch on severe violence and profanity and you will lose well under ten minutes while keeping every idea the novel is built to teach.