‘Home is Where we Start : Growing up in the fallout of the Utopian Dream’, is a Guardian 2024 “Book to Look Out For!”

@thebookseller “Nonfiction Editor's Choices for August”

Out with Fig Tree/Penguin 08/2024.

PREORDER HERE

'Beautiful, Bold, Tender. I loved this gorgeous memoir about making home'

Dr. Pragya Agarwal

'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

Early reviews and pre-order: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/457409/home-is-where-we-start-by-crossman-susanna/9780241650905

In the late seventies, six-year-old Susanna moved with her mother and siblings to a utopian commune in rural England. For over fifteen years, she lived inside a crumbling mansion with fifty adults and children, trying to remake the world.

Decades later, with the benefit of hindsight, she returns to her own childhood with pressing questions. What happens to children when we try to abolish the family? What is it really like to be the product of a social experiment? And how can we criticise the damage caused by revolutions while retaining a belief in the power of change? Part personal memoir, part critical analysis, Crossman turns to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and ethics to examine the many meanings of family and home.

Early reviews and pre-order: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/457409/home-is-where-we-start-by-crossman-susanna/9780241650905

In the late seventies, six-year-old Susanna moved with her mother and siblings to a utopian commune in rural England. For over fifteen years, she lived inside a crumbling mansion with fifty adults and children, trying to remake the world.

Decades later, with the benefit of hindsight, she returns to her own childhood with pressing questions. What happens to children when we try to abolish the family? What is it really like to be the product of a social experiment? And how can we criticise the damage caused by revolutions while retaining a belief in the power of change? Part personal memoir, part critical analysis, Crossman turns to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and ethics to examine the many meanings of family and home.