<b >This modern-day <i >Lord of the Flies</i> is a haunting existential novel, both award-winning and and provocative. Now in paperback as part of the Atheneum Collection!</b><P>“Nothing matters.” <P>“From the moment you are born, you start to die.”<P>“The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. You'll live to be a maximum of one hundred. Life isn't worth the bother!”<P>So says Pierre Anthon when he decides there is no meaning to life, leaves his seventh-grade classroom, climbs a plum tree, and stays there. His friends and classmates cannot get him to come down, not even by pelting him with rocks. So to prove to him that there is a meaning to life, they set out to give up things of importance, challenging one another to make increasingly serious sacrifices. The pile is started with a lifetime's collection of Dungeons & Dragons books, a fishing rod, a pair of green sandals, a pet hamster—but then, as each demand becomes more extreme, events take a morbid twist. And what if, after all these sacrifices, the pile is still not meaningful enough to bring Pierre Anthon down?