As David Cameron is seeking to bring back family values, Angela Neustatter investigates what we have learned about successful traditional and non-traditional families. What really binds people when living together? There is, since the sixties, half-a-century of experimentation and we should use these experiences to come up with a new concept. As the poet Philip Larkin wrily observed, and divorce statistics show, even being a traditional family is not enough on its own. Her investigation stretches from polyamorous couples, to group living, to pensioners, to living on council estates, to her own personal life. After her children had left home, she and her husband, for example, decided that they needed to separate their living arrangements in order to stay together. In this book, she goes in search of the stable alternative ways of living together that have flourished since the taboo on divorce disappeared in the late 1970s. She aims to discover the reasons that these alternatives work as well as the traditional model, in a gripping narrative that offers a genuinely new perspective on the modern family.