"Communal living: Plato recommended it, 19th-century religious separatists tried it, anarchists and hippies spectacularly failed at it. Attempting to live with no an . It's supposed to erase greed and create equality. You'd think that this important subject would have created a vast body of literature, but you'd be wrong. Novels about s are very rare and this might be because the ideal of "the communal" is at loggerheads with the bias towards "the individual" in the novel. But there are some gems, which are important documents of a noble, failed, social experiment."