This Other Eden
The lyrical historical novel, shortlisted for The Booker Prize
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4.0 • 13 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
'Masterful . . . has much to say to our times' Guardian
'Begs to be read' Spectator
'A luminous, thought-provoking novel' Esi Edugyan, author of Washington Black
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. But during one tumultuous summer at the dawn of the twentieth century, one prejudiced missionary lands on the island's shores, disrupting the community's fragile balance with everlasting consequences.
Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding's This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Harding (Tinkers) suffuses deep feeling into this understated yet wrenching story inspired by an isolated mixed-raced community's forced resettlement in 1912 Maine. Formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish-born wife Patience settled Apple Island more than a century earlier. Now, the hardscrabble community includes gender-bending and incestuous siblings Theophilus and Candace Lark and their four, mentally disabled children; a Civil War veteran named Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, who lives in a hollow tree; Irish sisters Iris and Violet McDermott, who raise three orphaned Penobscot children; and the Honeys' descendents. Christian missionary and retired schoolteacher Matthew Diamond has spent the past five years visiting the island during the summer to teach the community's children. A deeply prejudiced man, he prays for the strength to overcome his "visceral, involuntary repulsion" to Black people, and is continually shocked at the children's quick minds as well as Ethan Honey's talent for drawing. With eugenics on the rise, the state sets in motion a plan to clear the island and Diamond contrives to send Ethan to a colleague in Massachusetts, where he can pass as white and study art. Harding's close-third narration gives shape and weight to the community members' complicated feelings about their displacement, while his magisterial prose captures a sense of place ("the island a granite pebble in the frigid Atlantic shallows"). It's a remarkable achievement.
Customer Reviews
Community and love.
Beautifully written story about the importance of belonging. With messages related to our present world, this novel might possibly be a modern classic. Shortlisted for the Booker prize and a possible winner.
Island home
The author is American. He has an MFA in fiction from Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first novel, ‘Tinkers,’ won the 2010 Pulitzer for Fiction. ‘The Other Eden’, his third, was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker at the time I read it.
The narrative is based on true story. An escaped African-American slave and his white Irish wife settled on a small offshore island in Maine in 1792. Malaga island, Maine. Google it. In Mr Harding’s telling, it is called Apple Island. More than a hundred years later, a small racially integrated community has developed. Integrated they may be, but they are also outcasts, illiterate and poor, and an affront to the civilised folk of Maine proper, their state officials in particular. Eugenics was big in the USA, and elsewhere, in the early 20th century, so those officials forcibly evict and institutionalise the island’s inhabitants. The one exception is a light skinned boy, a gifted painter, who comes under the ring of the white missionary schoolteacher who has been trying to educate the community.
The prose is lyrical, heavy with adjectives and imagery, the pace slow: a convention historical novel is many respects, which why I doubt it will win the gong.