This Other Eden: International Edition Audiobook

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 Eden explores the hopes, the dreams, and the resilience of those perceived not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference.

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“Ballerini’s lyrical delivery highlights the poetic descriptions of the island’s physical environment and the comfortable rhythms of daily life, bolstering listeners’ empathy for the families…His tone becomes more straightforward…[and] gruffer when white male authorities begin to disrupt and disband the community.”

— AudioFile