This Other Eden

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction One of Barack Obama's 15 favorite books of 2023 • A New Yorker Best Books of 2023 • An NPR 2023 "Book We Love" Pick and Top 10 Book of 2023 • One of Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2023 • One of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2023 and Best Historical Fiction of 2023 • A Chicago Public Library Favorite Book of 2023 • A Fresh Air Top 10 Best Book of 2023 • A Publishers Weekly Best Fiction of 2023 "A testament of love." —Danez Smith, New York Times Book Review 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 desperately 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 orphaned Penobscot children; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their brood of vagabond children; the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree; and more. 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.

“This Eden is a delight, a rollicking ride that never lets up, with a surprising — and emotionally rich — ending.” — Quill & Quire (Starred Review) Michael Atarian is out of his depth. The closest he ever came to working in tech was when he rode a delivery bike for a food app in Vancouver. Yet when his coder girlfriend dies, he is inexplicably headhunted by a sinister tech mogul and transplanted to Silicon Valley. There, a reluctant spy named Aoife lures him into the hands of an enigmatic war-gamer who tricks them both into joining his quest to save the world. Hunted by government agents and corporate goons, and manipulated at every turn, Aoife and Michael find themselves in an intercontinental chase that takes them from California to New York, from the forests of Uganda to Jerusalem, Gaza, Alexandria, and Paris, and to a final showdown with the truth in Dublin. Propulsive and richly entertaining, This Eden updates the classic spy novel for a world under mortal threat from cyber-warfare, feral money, runaway technology, and a cynical onslaught on truth itself.

Part memoir, part adventure story, part intellectual voyage, The Other Side of Eden begins in the High Arctic of the 1970s. This was where Hugh Brody first lived with hunting peoples and where, as he explains, he first encountered a way of being that would transform how he saw the world. In this marvellous new book, Brody’s travels take him through exquisite landscapes of ice and snow with companions who know the land as a part of themselves. He also travels through time and space as he explores the divide between hunters and farmers that lies at the core of human history. Shaped with a compelling mix of order and intuition, The Other Side of Eden draws on the author’s personal experience, on the words of the hunter-gatherers he comes to know and on the work of linguists, anthropologists and historians. Finally, Brody poses questions about the mind itself, arriving at a compelling and profoundly hopeful conclusion. Something exists, he suggests, that is neither heaven nor hell, neither modern nor ancient, neither civilized nor primitive: a place within each of us where we can be beyond the dichotomies and ultimately more fully ourselves.

THIS OTHER EDEN is a captivating narrative of seven great gardens, beautiful canvases that represent not just pleasure grounds but a country's evolution. Showpieces of grand design, they are also barometers of social change; lasting reflections of intellectual endeavour, of religion and philosophy, science and technology, art and literature. From Robert Cecil's garden at Hatfield House, conceived by the famous botanist and plant-collector John Tradescant, who travelled widely to seek out unusual specimens, to Capability Brown, who 'improved' upon nature to create the archetypal English parkland; from Joseph Paxton, whose engineering feats at Chatsworth mirrored the great Victorian age of technology, to Getrude Jekyll, who turned back to nature and designed the English cottage garden renowned the world over, this beautifully illustrated book will join the ranks of other bestselling cultural histories of the garden such as Anna Pavord's THE TULIP and Simon Schama's THE EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES.

Terrorism, crack cocaine and rape. Failure, miscarriages and suicide. Divorce, incest and misery. This Other Eden is Michael Hemmingson at his most brutal. A man wins the lottery and loses his family. A book agent must deal with a wild girl writer, a white trash genius and a limousine full of angry teenagers. His protagonists scratch at the bottom of society desperate to maintain delusions of adequacy. They fall into each other with hatred and bile; emerging with their own unique form of heroism. Provocative and intriguing, THIS OTHER EDEN by Michael Hemmingson is akin to reading a cross between someone's private journal and a True Crime magazine. Feeling titillated and naughty, as if reading a sibling's most private and dirty secrets, I found myself wholly unwilling to put this book down. It is glorious train wreck of loss, betrayal, and crime mixed with intimate thoughts and a poignant sense of loneliness. THIS OTHER EDEN is the kind of book that will make you forget your own life for a while but will also allow you to be grateful for it when you put the book down. Jennifer Brozek, Submissions Editor, Apex Book Company

“A poignant, necessary entry into the children’s literary canon, Root Magic brings to life the history and culture of Gullah people while highlighting the timeless plight of Black Americans. Add in a fun, magical adventure and you get everything I want in a book!”—Justina Ireland, New York Times bestselling author of Dread Nation Debut author Eden Royce arrives with a wondrous story of love, bravery, friendship, and family, filled to the brim with magic great and small. It’s 1963, and things are changing for Jezebel Turner. Her beloved grandmother has just passed away. The local police deputy won’t stop harassing her family. With school integration arriving in South Carolina, Jez and her twin brother, Jay, are about to begin the school year with a bunch of new kids. But the biggest change comes when Jez and Jay turn eleven— and their uncle, Doc, tells them he’s going to train them in rootwork. Jez and Jay have always been fascinated by the African American folk magic that has been the legacy of their family for generations—especially the curious potions and powders Doc and Gran would make for the people on their island. But Jez soon finds out that her family’s true power goes far beyond small charms and elixirs…and not a moment too soon. Because when evil both natural and supernatural comes to show itself in town, it’s going to take every bit of the magic she has inside her to see her through. Walter Dean Myers Honor Award for Outstanding Children's Literature!

Special edition of Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel—featuring a new foreword by Marilynne Robinson and book club extras inside In this deluxe tenth anniversary edition, Marilynne Robinson introduces the beautiful novel Tinkers, which begins with an old man who lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past, where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature. The story behind this New York Times bestselling debut novel—the first independently published Pulitzer Prize winner since A Confederacy of Dunces received the award nearly thirty years before—is as extraordinary as the elegant prose within it. Inspired by his family’s history, Paul Harding began writing Tinkers when his rock band broke up. Following numerous rejections from large publishers, Harding was about to shelve the manuscript when Bellevue Literary Press offered a contract. After being accepted by BLP, but before it was even published, the novel developed a following among independent booksellers from coast to coast. Readers and critics soon fell in love, and it went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize, prompting the New York Times to declare the novel’s remarkable success “the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory.” That story is still being written as readers across the country continue to discover this modern classic, which has now sold over half a million copies, proving once again that great literature has a thriving and passionate audience. Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: Enon and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tinkers. He teaches at Stony Brook Southampton.

The American West in the early 1960s. Aspiring novelist Aaron Holland Broussard finds work on a farm and meets Joanne McDuffy, an articulate and fierce college student and gifted painter. Their soul connection is immediate, but their romance is complicated by Joanne's involvement with a shady professor who is mixed up with a drug-addled cult. When a sinister businessman and his son who wield their influence through vicious cruelty set their sights on Aaron, drawing him into an investigation of grotesque murders, it is clear that this idyllic landscape harbors tremendous power, and evil