Cults and communes in fiction

The Girls by Emma Cline

It’s the summer of 1969 and Evie Boyd is desperate to be noticed. When she sees a group of girls in the park, her imagination is immediately captured by them – by their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. As Evie becomes obsessed with Suzanne, a mesmerising older girl, she is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. (This novel is inspired by the Charles Manson and the grisly murders his followers committed.)


Arcadia by Lauren Groff

Set during the seventies, Arcadia House is a decaying mansion residing within the fields of western New York State. A few dozen idealists have moved in, determined to find a way to live off the land. As the Arcadians rise and fall across three generations, Lauren Groff (the author of one of last year’s most talked-about novels) follows their rollicking and tragic utopian dream from its hopeful beginning, through its heyday, and beyond.


Glory O'Brien’s History of the Future by A.S. King

Graduating from high school should be a time of possibilities, but Glory has no plan for what to do next and she’s feeling adrift. Her mother committed suicide when she was four, leaving Glory worried she will take the same fate, and her best friend lives on a hippie commune. But when Glory gains an astonishing ability to see a person’s infinite past and future, she is determined to prevent the terrifying visions from becoming reality.


Hope Farm by Peggy Frew

It is the winter of 1985. Silver’s mother, Ishtar, has fallen for the charismatic Miller and the three of them have moved to Hope Farm, a rural hippie commune located on a run-down property in Victoria. When they arrive, Silver finds unexpected friendship and, at last, a place to call home. But it is also here that, at just thirteen, she is thrust into an unrelenting adult world and her relationship with her mother begins to unravel.


The Leftovers by Tom Perrota

What if one day some of us simply vanished – and some were left behind? Following the sudden disappearance of thousands of citizens, Kevin Garvey, Mapleton’s new mayor, wants to bring a sense of hope to his community, but his family has fallen apart in the wake of disaster. Kevin’s wife has joined a homegrown cult, his son is a disciple of the prophet Holy Wayne, and his daughter is no longer the sweet student he remembers.


Holy Bible by Vanessa Russell

The large, raucous Bloom family are part of a Christadelphian sect in Ballarat, a small, close-knit community where you are forbidden from straying. While her eight brothers come to terms with the sect’s requirements of them – the weekly meetings and ceremonies, their father’s darkly comic rants about the end of the world and the expectations of the Brethren – Tranquility Bloom, the youngest of nine and the only daughter, dreams of becoming a nurse.


The Boundless Sublime by Lili Wilkinson

Ruby Jane Galbraith’s world is being torn apart and it’s all her fault. When she meets Fox, a gentle new friend, he’s the only one who seems to understand what she’s going through. He tells her about a group called the Institute of the Boundless Sublime, and soon Ruby is drawn into what she discovers is a terrifying, secretive community far from the ideal world she expected.

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Cover image for The Girls

The Girls

Emma Cline

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