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    This Other Eden
    This Other Eden
    This Other Eden
    Audiobook6 hours

    This Other Eden

    Written by Paul Harding

    Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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 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 Penobscot orphans; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their brood of vagabond
    children; the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran wholives in a hollow tree; Ethan Honey, a young artist; and Bridget Carney, an Irish housemaid. 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.

    Editor's Note

    Pulitzer Prize-winning author…

    In the 18th century, former slave Benjamin Honey settled Malaga Island off the coast of Maine alongside his Irish wife. Over a century later, government officials would forcefully displace the mixed-race inhabitants of Malaga. Many were involuntarily institutionalized. Harding (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Tinkers”) rehumanizes history in this fictitious retelling of true events, highlighting the effects of racism, eugenics, and colonization with affecting prose and rich characterization.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJan 24, 2023
    ISBN9781705090251
    This Other Eden
    Author

    Paul Harding

    PAUL HARDING has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2010, he received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his debut novel, Tinkers. Harding lives in Georgetown, Massachusetts. Find him online at tinkerspulitzer.com.

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    Reviews for This Other Eden

    4/5

    168 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Populating history with real people and the absolute tragic song of dispossession. Beautiful book
    • 5/5
      What a beautiful book. It is written with enormous grace and dignity
    • 5/5
      Terrible how terribly good intentions turn out almost every time.from This Other Eden by Paul Harding“Malaga Island was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid-1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead. Eight islanders were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded.” from Maine Coast Heritage Trust, quoted in This Other EdenThe novel opens with the riveting story of a terrible storm washing over a small island off the coast of Maine, with a family clinging to the branches of a large tree and watching houses and people caught in the angry waters in the flood below. The Eden that Benjamin Honey had built was destroyed in 1815. His wife Esther tells the tale to her grandchildren, the history of their Ark island.The Honey family had lived there for six generations, since an African ex-slave Civil War veteran and his Irish wife settled there. Their neighbors included the Larks with their colorless children, and the McDermott sisters who took in three orphaned Native American children, and the spinster Annie Parker, and Civil War veteran Zachary Hand who preferred his hollow tree to his cabin. The mixed races of the families had produced individuals of every type, the pale and the dark, green eyes and red hair, straight hair and tightly curled.It’s a harsh life but they have survived. Theirs is a tolerant society where brother and sister raise their children, and a man can don his mother’s dress to keep house while his wife cuts her hair and goes fishing on the ocean.The state sent a pastor to open a school. The community is Christian, the Bible and Shakespeare among the few, tattered books in the community. The teacher discovered a girl who is a mathematical prodigy, a boy who masters Latin, and another who is a gifted, untrained artist.The Eugenics movement was at its height. The islanders were disturbing. They were measured and assessed, labeled and judged to be degenerate by the “plain white” of the mainland. The mixing of races, the intermixing of blood, could not produce anything but imbeciles, morons, and degenerates.The entire population of Apple Island was relocated, many to institutions.The early book takes us into these people’s lives and personalities. Yes, there are relationships that we judge to be perverse. There are people whose sanity we may doubt. A girl who only eats wild things she finds, starfish and snakes. One woman was abused by her father, and intended to murder the resultant child. She was prevented, and her child and his children became the center of her old age. Zachary Hand carves images in his hollow tree where he finds peace. But we have sympathy for these people. They are removed from the world and a society that could not have accepted them, eking out a subsistence life, doing the best they could with what they had.The teacher determines to ‘save’ one child of the island, a fifteen-year-old boy with straight hair and and greenish eyes. He writes an acquaintance, hoping he would take the boy in until he could enter art school. It seemed a mercy to separate Ethan Honey from his family’s fate, to allow him access to white society.For all his good intentions, the teacher creates a series of disastrous events. Years in the future, historians will explore the buried history of the deserted island, and write about the paintings and drawings of the mysterious Ethan Honey.Beautifully written, with stunning descriptive passages and a mounting urgency, this is a novel of history and a vision of what society could have become, a condemnation and a warning.I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Set in the 1910s, This Other Eden is about a mixed race community forced to leave a small island off the coast of Maine that their families have lived on for more than 100 years. By showing how great harm can come from good intentions, Harding transforms historical events into a fable about a unique community that is destroyed in a heartbreaking way. It is an empathic tale that explores what constitutes a family and what makes a life worth living. This remarkable, understated, luminous novel is well worth reading. Given the issues he explores, it would make an outstanding book club selection.
    • 4/5
      This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island and its inhabitants, the descendants of Benjamin and Patience Honey. Based on the true story of Malaga Island, one of the first integrated towns in the Northeast, the book follows the fate of the Honey family and Apple Island itself.For such a short volume, it manages to capture an array of emotions. Alternating between the stories of the island's settlers and documentation from an outsider's perspective - that of the mainlanders and a future historical museum - the narrative gives the reader the feeling of being part of the islanders' community. Throughout the story, characters leave the island, characters arrive on the island, and well-meaning characters end up causing the upheaval of life as the islanders know it. The novel deals with social commentary in a "tell it like it is" fashion - Harding expects the reader to keep up and understand what the story is trying to communicate, and it does so in a way that doesn't make this reader feel like an idiot grasping at straws like some literary fiction can.I'm a fan of family sagas, and this is a rich one that dives deep without becoming a tome. It's the right length for the story it wants to tell, and Harding proves that you don't need in excess of three hundred pages to write something that makes the reader feel like they really know the family and its journey.I'm very glad I read this book - it excels at what it is trying to accomplish, and does so in a way that is moving and heartbreaking. If you too enjoy family sagas, I recommend this one for a cold winter day.Thank you to NetGalley and W. W. Norton for providing a copy for review.
    • 5/5
      Esther Honey is the matriarch of this island community. And Harding gives her a mystical prophetic quality. “Terrible how terribly good intentions turn out almost every time,” she muses and “no good ever came of being noticed by mainlanders.” These words haunt Harding’s fictional account of the dark historical¬ event that took place on an island off the coast of Maine in 1912—the forcible displacement of a peaceable mixed-race community. The state justified this travesty as a public health measure, but, in fact, it was based on faulty scientific and moral thinking along with suspicions of commercial greed. At bottom, however, the main driver always was racism.Harding depicts the islanders as flawed, but basically innocent and loving. Despite hunger and extreme poverty, they evince close ties to family, nature, art, education, and especially their home. Esther spends her time rocking and observing events while remembering an intensely troubling relationship with her dead White father. Her son, Eha, functions as an island handyman while also caring for his mother and his three children. His son, Ethan, is a central figure in the narrative for two main reasons: he is a gifted artist and can pass as a White. The Larks are a strange lot¬. Theophilus and Candace are siblings but live as husband and wife in a role reversal. Their four children are almost feral, roaming the island at night. Iris and Violet McDermott take in washing as well as two abandoned native-American children. Zachary Hand of God Proverb is especially “queer.” He is a Union Army veteran who spends his time in a hollow tree carving scenes from the bible. Not to be outdone by the humans, three highly distinctive dogs fill out the cast of characters. Their strangeness notwithstanding, the islanders are oblivious to how they are viewed by the outside. The mainlanders see them as degenerate and queer. Rumors of incest and infanticide persist. Their racial makeup is indeed eclectic and thus troubling to a state living in the thrall of eugenics. Harding refers to the community as a “distillate of Angolan fathers and Scottish grandpas, Irish mothers and Congolese grannies, Cape Verdean uncles and Penobscot aunts, cousins from Dingle, Glasgow, and Montserrat.” Matthew Diamond, a White missionary, and volunteer schoolteacher, sponsors a visit to the island by a governmental committee and thus unwittingly initiates the ultimate decision to remove the community and burn down its buildings. Diamond is a conflicted character. His self-image is as of a caring person yet he holds deep-seated racist feelings, especially toward Black people. Remarkably, he notices that several of the children are gifted, nonetheless the only one he moves to save from displacement is Ethan, who can easily pass as White.Harding deftly uses biblical imagery to bolster the view that the islanders were treated unjustly. Their founding story congers the flood. The use of apples as a key image for the island recalls the Eden myth. The expulsion of the islanders by heartless governmental bureaucrats brings to mind the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden by a vengeful God. Esther and Zachary as biblical prophets and Ethan as a Christ figure in the wilderness are more subtle but also powerful biblical iconography. Moreover, Harding achieves a mythic mood by using long, complex, and lyrical sentences that stand in contrast to the underlying racism and brutality on display elsewhere in the novel.