A Guardian book to look out for for 2024
''A bold and intimate grappling with the hidden history at the heart of a childhood that was set up as a collectivist social experiment'' EWAN MORRISON, author of How to Survive Everything
''Strikingly good'' NOREEN MASUD, author of A Flat Place
In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years.
While the Adults adopted new names and liberated themselves from domestic roles, the Kids ran free. In the community, nobody was too young to discuss nuclear war and children learned not to expect wiped noses or regular
