Four members of a nineteenth-century utopian commune find themselves emotionally involved in ways they could not have predicted.

In the fields of western New York State in the 1970s, a few dozen idealists set out to live off the land, founding a commune on the grounds of a decaying mansion called Arcadia House. They include Abe, a master carpenter; Hannah, a baker and historian; and Abe and Hannah's only child, Bit, born soon after the commune. Through Bit, Arcadia follows this romantic, rollicking, and tragic utopian dream from its hopeful start through its heyday and beyond....

When her grandmother takes fourteen-year-old Agnes, her younger brother, and best friend Honey and escapes Mount Blessing, a Connecticut religious commune, Agnes clings to the faith she loves while Honey looks toward a future free of control, cruelty, and preferential treatment.

Drawn by a mysterious stranger to a remote farming community that lives off the fertile mountain lands, a North Carolina teen is seduced by their high ideals before new friends begin to disappear.

In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology Ph. D. student and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug's possibilities such that their "research" becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a free-wheeling exploration...

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.

"For Jackie Pierce, everything changed the summer of 1979, when she spent three months of infinite freedom at her bohemian uncle's sprawling estate on the California coast. As musicians, artists, and free spirits gathered at The Sandcastle for the season in pursuit of inspiration and communal living, Jackie and her cousin Willa fell into a fast friendship, testing their limits along the rocky beach and in the wild woods ... until the summer abruptly...