When Mikey Cuddihy is orphaned at the age of nine, her life explodes. She is sent from New York to board at the experimental Summerhill School in Suffolk, and abandoned there. The setting is apparently idyllic: lessons are optional, pupils make the rules, and the late sixties are in full swing. But with this total freedom comes danger ... Caught in the unravelling social experiment of sixties and seventies Britain, Mikey must navigate this strange world of permissiveness and neglect, and forge an identity almost in defiance of it.