This Other Eden

by Paul Harding

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

This stunning novel, based on actual historical events, will leave readers breathless with its gorgeous prose and unforgettable characters. Harding brings Apple Island to life with his lush descriptions. It is a place, and a story that will live on in readers' minds for years to come.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize
Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction

A New Yorker Best Books of 2023 • An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick • An NPR Top 10 Book of 2023 • One of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2023 • A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2023 and Best Historical Fiction of 2023 • A Chicago Public Library Favorite Book of 2023 • A Fresh Air Top 10 Best Book of 2023 • A Publisher's Weekly Best Fiction of 2023

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast.

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.

During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community’s fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who, under the influence of the eugenics-thinking popular among progressives of the day, decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents, and develop the island as a vacation destination. Beginning with a hurricane flood reminiscent of the story of Noah’s Ark, the novel ends with yet another Ark.

In prose of breathtaking beauty and power, Paul Harding brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters: Iris and Violet McDermott, sisters raising three orphaned Penobscot children; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their brood of vagabond children; the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree; and more. A spellbinding story of resistance and survival, This Other Eden is an enduring testament to the struggle to preserve human dignity in the face of intolerance and injustice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324036296
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/24/2023
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	3,687
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Paul Harding is the author of Tinkers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and Enon. He is director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, and lives on Long Island, New York.

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/28/2022

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. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"A superb achievement…Harding combines an engrossing plot with deft characterizations and alluring language deeply attuned to nature’s artistry. The biblical parallels, which naturally align with the characters’ circumstances, add depth, and enhance the universality of the themes…This gorgeously limned portrait about family bonds, the loss of innocence, the insidious effects of racism, and the innate worthiness of individual lives will resonate long afterward."

Booklist (starred review) - Sarah Johnson

"Harding’s gifts have found their fullest expression in This Other Eden. Pick any excerpt from these 200 pages and you will find that 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."

The Guardian - Abhrajyoti Chakraborty

"This Other Eden is ultimately a testament of love: love of kin, love of nature, love of art, love of self, love of home. Harding has written a novel out of poetry and sunlight, violent history and tender remembering. 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."

New York Times - Danez Smith

"There is no writer alive anything like Paul Harding, and This Other Eden proves it: astonishingly beautiful, humane, strange, interested in philosophy and the heart, stunningly written. It’s about home, love, heredity, cruelty, and the very nature of art, so completely original it’s hard to know how to describe it in a mere blurb, by which I mean: you must read this book."

Elizabeth McCracken

"Harding, who won a dark-horse Pulitzer Prize for Tinkers, again demonstrates his gifts for concision and compassion in a narrative that balances historical fact with fully drawn characters...Sure to be a standout of 2023."

Los Angeles Times - Bethanne Patrick

★ 12/01/2022

Off the coast of Maine, Malaga Island supported a racially integrated community until the early 1900s, when the state evicted the islanders. In Pulitzer Prize winner Harding's (Tinkers) persuasive reimagining of the community, formerly enslaved Black man Benjamin Honey and his white Irish wife, Patience, land on Apple Island in 1793 and form an outpost that by 1911 includes their descendants, two sisters raising three Penobscot orphans, a brood of wayward children whose parents might be brother and sister, and Black Union Army veteran Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, who expertly carves biblical scenes into the tree where he shelters. The island isn't exactly paradise—there's cold, hunger, and an abusive father—but the community hangs together until the arrival of eugenics-minded white folks from the mainland. Matthew Diamond, a well-intentioned white preacher/teacher battling his own prejudices to live on the island in summertime, knows that the community's days are numbered and determines to save gifted young artist Ethan Honey, fair-skinned enough to send to the mainland for tutoring. His decision has sore consequences, and readers must wonder whether it was less heinous than the actions of the real Governor's Council, which dispatched all the islanders, institutionalized some, and exhumed their dead. VERDICT Harding's luscious, perfectly knit narrative delivers a sober understanding of human nature and racial hatred.

Library Journal

★ 2022-10-27
Harding’s third novel revisits an appalling moment in Maine history.

Early in the 20th century, the racially diverse residents of a small island community in Maine were evicted and displaced. The local authorities who carried out this task on Malaga Island cited science as one of their motivations—but what they called science is now obvious as eugenics, and these nominally lawful actions are now seen for what they truly were: a crime. Harding’s novel draws from this history, and its epigraph from the Maine Coast Heritage Trust gives the broad outline of what the reader can expect. But Harding is after something bigger here, using this fictionalized version of history both to comment on the interconnectedness of various coastal communities and to explore the ephemeral qualities that can be lost when regarding historical events from decades away. Harding focuses on different characters over the course of the novel, including a young man named Ethan Honey, the descendant of a former slave, whose artistic skills offer the promise of a better future; Esther Honey, Ethan’s mother, who grapples with her own haunted family history and possesses a stunning knowledge of all things Shakespearean; and the well-intentioned retired White schoolteacher Matthew Diamond, who begins the novel “oblivious to the greater, probably utter, catastrophe” his presence is going to spark but finds unexpected moral reserves. As these characters find themselves rethinking their places in the world, Harding summons up lyrical sheets of prose, including one of the most evocative descriptions of a lobster dinner you’re likely to encounter. He has an eye for a striking image, as when Ethan is painting: “Put the haystacks in the sky, bristling and sharp, rasping across the lowering blue.” It’s a brief book that carries the weight of history.

A moving account of community and displacement.

Kirkus Reviews

"Stunning…You could imagine lots of ways a historical novel about this horror might be written, but none of them would give you a sense of the strange spell of This Other Eden—its dynamism, bravado and melancholy. Harding’s style has been called ‘Faulknerian’ and maybe that’s apt, given his penchant for sometimes paragraph-long sentences that collapse past and present…[An] intense wonder of a historical novel."

NPR - Maureen Corrigan

"Beautiful, brooding…Harding paints a rich, unvarnished portrait of Apple Island and its residents…Long, cascading sentences sometimes loop back on themselves to add salient details; others rush forward to encapsulate as much complexity as they can…Harding’s finely wrought prose shows us a community that refuses to see itself through the judgmental eyes of others, a society composed of people who give their neighbors the same latitude to go their own way that they claim for themselves. It closes on a note of determined hope, with an emblem of continuity and endurance held high above the waters that separate Apple Island from the censorious mainland."

Wendy Smith

"A superb achievement…Harding combines an engrossing plot with deft characterizations and alluring language deeply attuned to nature’s artistry. The biblical parallels, which naturally align with the characters’ circumstances, add depth, and enhance the universality of the themes…[T]his gorgeously limned portrait about family bonds, the loss of innocence, the insidious effects of racism, and the innate worthiness of individual lives will resonate long afterward."

Booklist (starred review)

"Frequent lyrical passages, which are as epic, forceful and sweeping as the floods the book depicts and recalls…Just as wonderful are the book’s frequent small touches."

Times Literary Supplement (UK) - Clifford Thompson

"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 (UK) - Rachel Seiffert

"[This Other Eden] is a harrowing tale of paradise lost and a lyrical examination of people in isolation just trying to get by…[It] is a novel that is both devastating and meditative, a combination that is characteristic of [Paul] Harding’s work."

New York Times - MJ Franklin

"With gorgeous, often antique prose, Harding takes us into the prelapsarian world of the islanders…Harding has a gift for using language with intense precision that evokes his characters’ points of view."

Boston Globe - Carolyn Kellogg

"In boldly lyrical prose, This Other Eden shows us a once-thriving racial utopia in its final days, at a time when race and science were colliding in chilling ways. In the stories of the Apple Islanders—especially that of Ethan Honey, spared a destructive fate because of his artistic gifts and his fair skin—we are made to confront the ambiguous nature of mercy, the limits of tolerance, and what it means to truly be saved. A luminous, thought-provoking novel."

Esi Edugyan

"Tender, magical, and haunting, Paul Harding’s This Other Eden is that rare novel that makes profound claims on our present age while being, very simply, a graceful performance of language and storytelling. Here is prose that touchingly holds its imagined island community in a light that can only be described as generous and dazzling. I have not read a novel this achingly beautiful in a while, nor one in which the fate of its characters I will not soon forget."

Major Jackson

"[Paul Harding] writes with the gravitas of a mythmaker…The pace of Harding’s storytelling is stately, his descriptions, even of small events, gorgeous…This Other Eden is beautiful and agonizing—rather like the real place that inspired it."

Harper's Magazine - Claire Messud

A harrowing tale of paradise lost and a lyrical examination of people in isolation just trying to get by.”

New York Times

In 1912, Maine’s governor forcibly evacuated a small community from their Malaga Island home, claiming the mixed-race inhabitants were morally and mentally deficient. This novel, narrated by Edoardo Ballerini, is based on this tragic event. Ballerini's lyrical delivery highlights the poetic descriptions of the island's physical environment and the comfortable rhythms of daily life, bolstering listeners' empathy for the families struggling to do their best with what little they have. His tone becomes more straightforward when the narrative changes to historical documents and is gruffer when white male authorities begin to disrupt and disband the community. The character study draws a harsh, vivid distinction between the insular island people and the self-righteous outsiders who want to take over the island for their own use. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2023 - AudioFile

In 1912, Maine’s governor forcibly evacuated a small community from their Malaga Island home, claiming the mixed-race inhabitants were morally and mentally deficient. This novel, narrated by Edoardo Ballerini, is based on this tragic event. Ballerini's lyrical delivery highlights the poetic descriptions of the island's physical environment and the comfortable rhythms of daily life, bolstering listeners' empathy for the families struggling to do their best with what little they have. His tone becomes more straightforward when the narrative changes to historical documents and is gruffer when white male authorities begin to disrupt and disband the community. The character study draws a harsh, vivid distinction between the insular island people and the self-righteous outsiders who want to take over the island for their own use. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2023 - AudioFile