The Mosquito Coast

Allie Fox is a Harvard-educated inventor convinced that America is on the brink of collapse, so he uproots his wife and four children and moves them to the remote jungle of the Mosquito Coast in Honduras. There he sets out to build a perfect society from scratch, complete with a giant ice-making machine he hauls into the wilderness. His son Charlie narrates the slow unraveling as Allie's brilliance hardens into obsession, the family's situation grows desperate, and the jungle refuses to bend to one man's will. Theroux turns a father's idealism into a study of tyranny and the children who pay for it.