Cult fiction – Amity and Sorrow by Peggy Riley

There’s an attraction, certainly, in joining a cult. Not a Sheryl Sandberg working women type cult but a good old fashioned we’re all in it together wearing hemp skirts type cult. No need to chivvy the nanny, check the Blackberry or prepare for 8am meetings. Simply pack the children off to daycare (the yard) and hoe some vegetables. That’s pretty much it for the day – apart from some worship and chatting to close female friends – until it’s time for hallucinogenic weeds and sex with a man who says he loves you.

Amity & Sorrow, the debut novel for new imprint Tinder Press by Peggy Riley, explores the appeal of polygamous cults. It begins brutally, a crash that leaves the occupants of the car as bewildered and disorientated as the reader. The middle of Oklahoma: the three women do not know where they are, only that four days’ drive away lies both the commune which, consumed by fire, they have escaped and the husband and father they are convinced is now tracking them down.