Skip content
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
Home Is Where We Start by Susanna Crossman
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Home Is Where We Start

Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream
Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Narrator Susanna Crossman

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 14 hours 52 minutes
Language English
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Brought to you by Penguin.

A Guardian book to look out for for 2024


In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years.

While the Adults adopted new names and liberated themselves from domestic roles, the Kids ran free. In the community, nobody was too young to discuss nuclear war and children learned not to expect wiped noses or regular bedtimes. Instead, they made a home in a house with no locks or keys, never knowing when they opened doors whether they’d find violent political debates or couples writhing under sheets.

Decades later, and armed with hindsight, Crossman revisits her past, turning to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society she grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home. In this luminous memoir, she asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments and explores how growing up estranged from the outside world shapes her as a parent today.

'A bold and intimate grappling with the hidden history at the heart of a childhood that was set up as a collectivist social experiment' EWAN MORRISON, author of How to Survive Everything

'Strikingly good' NOREEN MASUD, author of A Flat Place

'Crossman writes with such curiosity and heart-breaking honesty of what it is to find her own truth. I was enthralled by this book' LILY DUNN, author of Sins of my Father

'Beautiful, bold, tender. I loved this gorgeous memoir about making home' PRAGYA AGARWAL, author of Hysterical

© Susanna Crossman 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

Susanna Crossman grew up in an international utopian community in England during the 1970s and 80s. Now based in France, she works internationally as a writer, clinical arts therapist, and lecturer. Her recent writing has featured in Aeon, the Paris Review and Berfois. She is a published novelist in French, and regularly collaborates with artists. She lives with her partner and three daughters.

Susanna Crossman grew up in an international utopian community in England during the 1970s and 80s. Now based in France, she works internationally as a writer, clinical arts therapist, and lecturer. Her recent writing has featured in Aeon, the Paris Review and Berfois. She is a published novelist in French, and regularly collaborates with artists. She lives with her partner and three daughters.

Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

A wondrous book. Brave and beautifully written. An extraordinary anxiety-inducing dive into life in a late-70s/80s utopia, told through a child's eyes. Will live with me a long time. A brilliant memoir - a touching, propulsive and shocking portrayal of a childhood in a utopian community, framed by a fascinating exploration of what it means to create a space called home I hugely admire Crossman’s resistance against the tyranny of it all – and her constant will to survive Crossman's extraordinary memoir of the tyranny of her childhood is heartbreaking, eye-opening, and difficult to put down A bold and intimate grappling with the hidden history at the heart of a childhood that was set up as a collectivist social experiment. A true piece of work and one that is historically significant Ambitious, compelling ... The diarist’s sense of urgency and the child’s creative use of language have stayed with her, often producing vivid prose Vivid and painfully honest ... Painful to read but so beautifully done ... There's something of the Levy sensibility here. It's serious and poetic. It's delicate and wise. It's a multilayered excavation, a rich but also careful unfolding of the truth Vivid and poignant ... A powerful memoir of a particularly unusual childhood ... Concrete, disturbing and moving This isn’t a misery memoir. Crossman examines philosophical and sociological perspectives on the meaning of home, giving insight both into why utopias are unattainable and why we shouldn’t try to reach them in the first place Beautiful, Bold, Tender. I loved this gorgeous memoir about making home Home is Where We Start joins an important conversation about the damage done to children by 1970s parents who gave up conventional family life for utopian ideals, but ended up chasing an ephemeral dream. Moving between the personal and theory, it is an important analysis of what home means to us all. Writing through image and objects, through metaphor and symbolism, Susanna takes us right into the heart of her unconventional childhood, full of joy and neglect, of wonder and pain. She writes with such curiosity and heart-breaking honesty of what it is to find her own truth. I was enthralled by this book, and how Susanna in the end uses her own experiences of neglect as a superpower, to create a loving home and to help those in need of care. Crossman is strikingly good on how children pay the price for adult utopian fantasies, as props and as scapegoats Authentic, irreverent and generous. Crossman breathes fresh life into a childhood spent living in an experimental community in the English countryside. In vivid, staccato prose, she plunges from screamingly funny episodes into fear and despair, conjuring dizzying freedoms, strange new ‘rules’, the constant lack of privacy and the bright hopes that magnetise everyone around her. It’s a miracle she emerged intact to gift us this story, shot through with understanding and forgiveness A gripping account of a childhood lived among idealist zealots: detailed, lyrical and full of insight, told with the dispassionate eye of the anthropologist, but also the emotional engagement of the adult looking back at the child Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting