SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE
'Masterful . . . [This Other Eden] has much to say to our times.' Guardian
'A testament of love . . . so real it could make you weep.' Danez Smith, New York Times
'A luminous, thought-provoking novel.' Esi Edugyan, author of Washington Black
Set at the beginning of the twentieth century and inspired by historical events, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of the United States where waves of castaways - in flight from society and its judgment - have landed and built a home.
Benjamin Honey- American, Bantu, Igbo- born enslaved- freed or fled at fifteen- aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, and discovered they could make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. Then comes the intrusion of 'civilization': 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, 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.
'Harding invites comparisons with authors such as William Faulkner, Robinson and even Elizabeth Strout . . . This Other Eden . . . begs to be widely read.' Spectator
Rezensionen / Stimmen
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 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 * 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 *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Maße
Höhe: 221 mm
Breite: 141 mm
Dicke: 24 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-5291-5254-8 (9781529152548)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Paul Harding is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, and Enon. He teaches at the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, and lives on Long Island, New York.
