Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia

Better to Have Gone is a haunting and elegant story about love, faith, and the search for utopia—and the often devastating cost of idealism.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in exploring the underexplored yet universal idea of utopia and portrays in vivid detail the daily life of one such community.

With richly atmospheric prose, Akash Kapur probes the tragic individual fates of two lovers who died two decades later on a cracked concrete floor in a remote canyon, and how their deaths intersected with the collective history of their town.

This book is a riveting account of human aspiration and folly taken to extremes, and will leave readers with a newfound appreciation for the complexities of utopian communities.