Quarry

Boiler House Press, 2023. Trade Paperback. New. New. The most disturbing English novel of the 1960s, brought back to print after over 50 years. Todd, Randy, and Carter come across a boy while roaming the countryside near their town. They take him hostage in a cave in an abandoned quarry and consider what to do next. In Lord of the Flies, William Golding needed a plane crash and a desert island to bring out the capacity for violence and evil in his English schoolboys. Jane White, a mother and housewife living in Godalming when she wrote Quarry, needed only a chance encounter in fields not unlike those around her own development. Quarry is deeply unsettling. White's teenaged kidnappers ride bikes, worry about exams, have to be home in time for supper. Yet they also imprison and torture another boy with the cold calculating objectivity that Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." Written in cool, realistic prose, Quarry pulls the reader into a vortex of violence and inhumanity. It's a gripping and believable account of a crime and a parable filled with complex symbolism. "Nothing since A High Wind in Jamaica probes the depths of innocence with such terror and finesse as Jane White's novel," declared Newsday. ~ Publisher.