This Other Eden (the New Novel From The Winner Of The Pulitzer Prize)

By (author) Harding, Paul
Description

''A testament of love: love of kin, love of nature, love of art, love of self, love of home.'' Danez Smith, New York Times

''A luminous, thought-provoking novel.'' Esi Edugyan, author of Washington Black

Set at the beginning of the twentieth century and inspired by historical events, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of the United States where waves of castaways - in flight from society and its judgment - have landed and built a home.

Benjamin Honey- American, Bantu, Igbo- born enslaved- freed or fled at fifteen- aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, and discovered they could make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys'' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. Then comes the intrusion of ''civilization'': officials determine to ''cleanse'' the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities'' institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah''s Ark.

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.

Review quote
This Other Eden is ultimately a testament of love: love of kin, love of nature, love of art, love of self, love of home . . . The humans he has created are, thankfully, not flattened into props and gimmicks, which sometimes happens when writers work across time and difference; instead they pulse with aliveness, dreamlike but tangible, so real it could make you weep.
Review quote
Harding''s new novel is suffused with the tremulous imagery and soaring imagination that won him the Pulitzer Prize . . . Exquisite.
Review quote
In Paul Harding''s new novel, the Pulitzer prize-winning author''s gifts have found their fullest expression . . . Each sentence contains multitudes and works well by itself, and yet the chapters, the paragraphs, have also been sewn together into a numinous whole . . . the novel impresses time and again because of the depth of Harding''s sentences, their breathless angelic light.
Review quote
(A) powerful third novel . . . a moving indictment of a shocking episode in America''s past that is rendered in lyrical prose.
Review quote
Gripping.
Biographical note
Paul Harding is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, and Enon. He teaches at the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, and lives on Long Island, New York.