This Other Eden: The new novel from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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Description

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a profoundly moving story of an island refuge, and a community of outcasts living on borrowed time. 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. 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 neighbors- 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.

Reviews

The Pulitzer prize-winning author's gifts have found their fullest expression . . . [This Other Eden] impresses time and again because of the depth of Harding's sentences, their breathless angelic light. * Observer *
Masterful . . . This Other Eden is a story of good intentions, bad faith, worse science, but also a tribute to community and human dignity and the possibility of another world. In both, it has much to say to our times. * Guardian *
Harding's new novel is suffused with the tremulous imagery and soaring imagination that won him the Pulitzer Prize . . . Exquisite. -- Catherine Taylor * Financial Times *
Rich and full-bodied in its lyricism, Harding's novel, too, is part warning, part memorial, but perhaps above all, reinforces the power of art to bring us into sympathy with strangers' lives. * Daily Mail *
Harding invites comparisons with authors such as William Faulkner, Robinson and even Elizabeth Strout . . . This Other Eden . . . begs to be widely read. * Spectator *

Author Bio

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.