This Other Eden
Author(s): Paul Harding
Fiction | 2023 Booker Prize Shortlist | Staff picks
From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a profoundly moving story of an island refuge, and a community of outcasts living on borrowed time.
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discovered an island where they could make a life together. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain there, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours - a pair of sisters raising three Penobscot orphans; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their nocturnal brood; the prophetic Zachary Hand To God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who carves Biblical images in a hollow tree. Then comes the intrusion of "civilization"- eugenics-minded state 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, This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference.
Product Information
A novel inspired by the true story of the once racially integrated Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Paul Harding is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, and Enon. He is director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, and lives on Long Island, New York.
General Fields
- :
- : Random House UK
- : Hutchinson Heinemann
- : 0.366
- : 30 October 2022
- : 2.4 Centimeters X 14.4 Centimeters X 22.2 Centimeters
- : books
Special Fields
- : Paul Harding
- : FV
- : 208
- : English
- : Hardback