Boiler House

It is a rare page-turner that sets readers to wondering who they are and why they are here, and in a just world this skillful exploration of the human predicament via riveting fiction would earn Harris his own unique place in the canon, alongside Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Iris Murdoch, and Graham Greene.

Along the continuum leading from Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies to Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, White’s enigmatic, unnerving parable evokes the uneasy volatility of its own permissive age. Book groups will appreciate Helen Hughes’s (German and film studies, Univ. of Surrey) scholarly afterword, which adds helpful context to White’s engrossing ambiguities.