Utopian Dreams

From the author of the bestselling The Dark Heart of Italy comes a different kind of travel book, a diary of one man’s search for the good life.

Fed up with cynicism, consumer culture and loneliness, Tobias Jones and his family spend a year living in a variety of alternative communities, from New Age communes to old-fashioned farmyards to Christian detox centres, asking the big questions along the way. Is it possible to be an idealist? Can you be part of a close-knit community and still be yourself? Above all, Jones dares to ask one unfashionable, counter-intuitive question: do communities simply work better when religion, rather than secularism, is at their heart?