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teen fiction, she often whinges like a teenager herself — squealing at cockroaches and pining for Marks & Spencer P ercy Pig sweets and Topshop as her less materialistic husband encourages her to cycle down volcanoes and throw her daughter a party in a rice paddy.
She’s at her sharpest tearing into the Western hippy culture she finds i n Bali, where the people she nicknames the ‘sparkle ponies’ live on green juice (when they’re not having it irrigated from their colons) and spend their days searching for the right noise to express the colour of their auras and having their vaginas ‘rejuvenated, exfoliated and moisturised’ by clay sticks tipped with healing crystals.
But she also surprises herself by becoming more spiritually openminded, embracing ‘ecstatic dance’ and even having Alula exorcised after hearing that two demons are squatting on the child’s aura.
This aside, Alula seems to have had a good time: there’s a lot to be said for a computer -free childhood that teaches an attachment to people, not places or things. Ironically , it ’s the influx of W estern paradise - seekers like themselves that drives them out after four years.
The paddy fields are being eaten up by property developers and Alderson is having to wear ear defenders while she writes due to the noise from builders and the day- l ong screaming from the ‘T antric soundhealing workshops’ hosted by their hippy neighbours.
They’re back in London — but they don’t call it home.
As Alula, now eight, tells them: ‘If you have a home, then it ’s harder to leave and then you don’t get to have so many adventures.’