Inspired by historical events at the beginning of the twentieth century, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of Maine where waves of castaways have landed and built a home.
In 1792, the formerly enslaved, aspiring orchardist Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, arrive on an island where they can make a life together. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, along with an eccentrically diverse band of neighbors: a pair of sisters raising three Penobscot orphans; Theophilus and Candace Lark and their nocturnal brood; and the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree.
Then "civilization" intrudes: officials determined to "cleanse" the island and a missionary-schoolteacher who selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will be left to succumb to institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah's Ark.
In prose of transcendent beauty and power, Paul Harding's This Other Edenexplores the hopes, the dreams, and the resilience of those perceived not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference.
