Drop City

In T. C. Boyle's ninth novel, a group of homesteaders and commune-dwellers in the most frigid part of Alaska find their placid lives disrupted by the clash of ideas and values. Set in 1970, DROP CITY explores the spaced-out worldview of the counterculture, and the tensions that arise when the political and the personal fail to coincide. In DROP CITY, as Boyle says on his website, "What is at stake is freedom. That and survival." Despite the classically hippie trappings of the novel, Boyle never allows his voluminous cast of characters--who include flower children, draft-dodgers, back-to-the-landers, and macho fur-trappers--to slide into caricature.