A staggering portrait of a crumbling utopia, this "timeless and vast" novel filled with the "raw beauty" beautifully depicts an idyllic commune in New York State -- and charts its eventual yet inevitable downfall (Janet Maslin, The New York Times). NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Timeless and vast... The raw beauty of Ms. Groff's prose is one of the best things about Arcadia. But it is by no means this book's only kind of splendor."---Janet Maslin, The New York Times "Even the most incidental details vibrate with life Arcadia wends a harrowing path back to a fragile, lovely place you can believe in."---Ron Charles, The Washington Post 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 centered on the grounds of a decaying mansion called Arcadia House. Arcadia follows this romantic utopian dream from its hopeful start through its heyday. Arcadia's inhabitants include Handy, the charismatic leader; his wife, Astrid, a midwife; Abe, a master carpenter; Hannah, a baker and historian; and Abe and Hannah's only child, Bit. While Arcadia rises and falls, Bit, too, ages and changes. He falls in love with Helle, Handy's lovely, troubled daughter. And eventually he must face the world beyond Arcadia. In Arcadia, Groff displays her literary gifts to stunning effect. "Fascinating."---People (****) "It's not possible to write any better without showing off."---Richard Russo, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls "Dazzling."---Vogue

As a study of how utopian cultures go wrong, Arcadia is a good novel that handles it subject with complexity and sympathy. Told from the perspective of Bit, a boy who grows up on the commune, Groff allows readers to follow the community from its inception, through its struggles, to its uneven and destructive growth, and finally to its disintegration and the aftermath. Throughout, Groff gives us a variety of voices to follow, most notably in Bit's parents Abe and Hannah, who believe in the commune in different ways for different reasons. We never questioned the folly of the project, and some of the mistakes were obviously going to happen, but we never lost sympathy for the characters trying to make it all work. Bit's movement into adolescence was terrific, and the disillusionment with the community that he develops is very real and very rewarding to read. Everything goes wrong in true and believable ways. That is, until the end. Groff missteps in the final chapters by pretty grossly misunderstanding what global warming is, and while the familial resolutions in that final section are still true, that kind of ridiculous setting in a book that was otherwise so careful and detailed in its world construction was jarring for most of us. So, we liked Arcadia a lot as a group, but most of us wished that the book didn't suddenly make a turn into climate horror at the end when it really, really didn't have to.