When a young woman leaves her family, and the civilized world, to join an off-the-grid community headed by an enigmatic leader, she discovers that belonging comes with a deadly cost, in this lush and searing debut novel. At nineteen, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place...

Don, the head of a communal living property, fears he is losing control of a wife who no longer loves him, a rebellious teenage daughter, and a son who has become obsessed with apocalypse theories, a situation that compels Don to throw an ambitious party.

"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." So begins Toni Morrison's Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away,...

"Sixty years after the publication of his first novel, Cat Man, Edward Hoagland is publishing his twenty-fifth book at the age of eighty-three. This capstone novel, set in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, introduces Press, a stockbroker going blind. Press has lost his job and his wife and is trying to figure out his next move, holed up in his Vermont cabin surrounded by a hippy commune, drug runners, farmers-gone-bust, blood-thirsty auctioneers, and general...

"HALCYON is the answer for all Americans who want to escape, but paradise isn't what it seems. A beautiful island in the middle of Lake Ontario--a self-sustaining community made up of people who want to live without fear, crime, or greed. Halcyon is run by Valerie Kemp, aka Mother Moon, benevolent and altruistic on the outside, but hiding an unimaginable darkness inside. She has dedicated her life to the pursuit of Glam Moon, a place of eternal beauty...

"In landlocked Gainesville, Florida, in the hot, fraught summer of 1999, a college dropout named David sleepwalks through his life -- a dull haze of office work and Internet porn -- until a run-in with a lost friend jolts him from his torpor. He is drawn into the vibrant but grimy world of Fishgut, a rundown house where a loose collective of anarchists, burnouts, and libertines practice utopia outside society and the law. Some even see their life...

A group of teenage girls living in a cult are ensnared by suspicion and paranoia when one of them goes missing. Beautiful, virtuous Havenwood is intended to be a refuge from an unsafe world. The cult that lives there includes nine girls. When one of them goes missing -- departed with no warning -- did she stray willingly, or did something more sinister occur? The remaining girls seek answers. Should they be angry? Frightened? Or perhaps... both?...

"Starbird has spent the first sixteen years of her life on a commune in the woods of Washington State. When she gets her Calling to become a waitress at the farm's satellite restaurant in Seattle, it means leaving behind the only place she's ever known and entering the World Outside"--