It's 1978 and the inhabitants of Gaialands, an idealist vegan commune in the Coromandel, are living the sustainable dream. Although, please, don't be fooled into thinking it's a hotbed of free-loving flower children - a bunch of dirty hippies smoking hash and making love. Rather, it's a self-sufficient community, free from the shackles of capitalism and social conditioning.
It's true, traditional monogamous relationships aren't all that important, although the adults can form partnerships if they want to and, as for the children, they're being raised as one amorphous tribe, with no idea who their siblings are or which adults are their biological parents. In theory, they're one big, happy family.
However, as the seven children mature and develop, they also start to experience the natural urges that arrive with adolescence so, one day, the adults decide it is prudent to explain to the children from which branches of the family tree they have sprung. The adults might be relaxed about sexual freedom but they're not at all keen to promote incest. And fair enough, too.
Poppy, our main character, is in her mid-teens and Gaialands is all she's ever known. As the story begins, the children, six of them aged from 17 down to 11, have just learned who their siblings are and which of the adults are their parents - pretty mindblowing stuff.
In many ways, their childhood comes across as idyllic, a gang of youngsters who, when they're not working, are free-ranging across the land, halcyon days spent at the beach with nothing but a bag of apples for food and each other for company. But it's also an isolated life, the food is plain, to say the least (molasses will never be a patch on maple syrup), and it's a lot of hard work - mucking out pig pens, digging long-drops, sharing everything and dealing with the seemingly endless damp of winter. Gaialands may not be perfect, but it was set up in good faith, the hearts of the early settlers are in the right place and it all runs pretty smoothly, at least on the surface.
