This Other Eden

Author Paul Harding
Narrator Edoardo Ballerini
Publisher Cornerstone
Publish Date 24 August 2023
Run Time 6 hours and 9 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Family life fiction, Historical fiction, Narrative theme: Displacement, exile, migration, Narrative theme: Identity / belonging.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. But during one tumultuous summer at the dawn of the twentieth century, one prejudiced missionary lands on the island's shores, disrupting the community's fragile balance with everlasting consequences.

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.

'Masterful . . . has much to say to our times' Guardian

'Begs to be read' Spectator

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

©2023 Paul Harding (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

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

Financial Times

Guardian

Harding’s new novel is suffused with the tremulous imagery and soaring imagination that won him the Pulitzer Prize . . . Exquisite.

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

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.

New York Times

Powerful . . . a moving indictment of a shocking episode in America’s past that is rendered in lyrical prose.

Mail on Sunday

[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.

Harper's

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