This Other Eden (Paul Harding)

Author: Paul Harding
Published: 2023
Pages: 224
Prize: Recent Prize Short List (Shortlist, Man Booker 2023)

 

 

 

 

 

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In 1792, Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife Patience settled on an island where their descendants flourished among a diverse community. Over a century later, state officials and a missionary teacher threaten their haven with eugenics and forced assimilation, saving only one light-skinned boy. This Other Eden explores the resilience and dreams of those marginalized by a brutally intolerant world.

 Complexity

CEFR: C1
Plot Complexity: moderate
Language Complexity: rich
Ideas Complexity: moderate

 

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Blurb

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.

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