The Mosquito Coast: Paul Theroux (Penguin Essentials, 49) - Tapa blanda

The Mosquito Coast - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - is a breathtaking novel about fanaticism and a futile search for utopia from bestseller Paul Theroux. Published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.

Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.

'Stunning. . . exciting, intelligent, meticulously realised, artful' Victoria Glendinning, Sunday Times

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

'Magnificently stimulating and exciting' Anthony Burgess

' "What kind of country is it that turns shoppers into traitors and honest men into liars? No one ever thinks of leaving this country. Charlie, I think of it every day." '

Allie Fox is sick of America and sick of humanity. Abandoning his home, he takes his family to live in the dense jungles of Honduras. An inventor, Allie is convinced there isn't a problem his mechanical genius can't solve and soon he is assembling the elements of a new, better world.

But Allie's Eden demands sacrifices - everyone must obey his rules and listen to his rants. As doubts creep in, so Allie heads deeper into the jungle and leads his family further into despair and darkness.

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