The Mosquito Coast

Prescribed Texts for HSC 2009-2012-Extension Module B: Texts and Ways of Thinking: Elective 3: Navigating the Global

Allie Fox was going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, scavengers and funny-bunnies of the twentieth century, he abandons civilization and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, quixotic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness and terror.

'An epic of paranoid obsession that swirls the reader headlong to deposit him on a black mudbank of horror' - Guardian

'Paul Theroux is a major writer of his generation' -Washington Post

'As oppressive and powerful as its central character. It bursts with inventiveness' – The Times