Listed in

Ibiza, 1960: on the beautiful Mediterranean island, the high-rise resorts are still decades away. By chance, Damien Enright, twenty-one-years old and Irish, arrives there with his wife and two children and finds a handful of down-at-heel foreign Bohemians leading wild, hedonistic lives. He and his wife get involved; their marriage quickly breaks down and he spends two heartbroken years in London before returning to Ibiza with a new partner and another child. They take LSD and inspired by dreams of a brave new world cross to the remote island of Formentera to lead ‘alternative’ lives.

This is a decade before Howard Marks became ‘Mr. Nice’: the embryonic drug culture in the west is motivated not by profit but by idealism. Sometimes, the search for ‘freedom’ ventures not just beyond the mind but beyond the law. To sustain their families on Formentera, Enright and two desperado pals head to London in a beat-up car and do some risky travelers check scams. Then, restless and unsure of his love for his partner, he makes a hair-raising trek to Turkey in the depths of winter to find hashish for the group. Things go badly wrong and he find himself a fugitive, at the mercy of unreliable friends. This is road story, drug story, love story a parable about drug ‘enlightenment’ and the loss and rediscovery of love.

Source: Goodreads