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

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.

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.

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. -- Danez Smith * New York Times * Harding's new novel is suffused with the tremulous imagery and soaring imagination that won him the Pulitzer Prize . . . Exquisite. -- Catherine Taylor * Financial Times * 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. * Observer * (A) powerful third novel . . . a moving indictment of a shocking episode in America's past that is rendered in lyrical prose. * Mail on Sunday * Gripping. * Glamour *