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
“A story of good intentions, bad faith, worse science, but also a tribute to community and human dignity and the possibility of another world. In both, it has much to say to our times.”
— The Guardian (London)Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Paul Harding is the author of several books, including Tinkers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He is director of the MFA degree program in creative writing and literature at Stony Brook University.
Edoardo Ballerini, an American actor, director, film producer, and multiaward–winning narrator. He has won several Audie Awards for best narration, including for 2019’s Best Male Narrator of the Year. He was named by Booklist as winner of their 2023 Voice of Choice Award, and was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine in 2019. He has narrated over two hundred audiobooks, from classics to modern masters, from bestsellers to the inspirational, from Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners to spine-tingling series, and much more. In television and film, he is best known for his roles in A Murder at the End of the World, The Sopranos, 24, I Shot Andy Warhol, Dinner Rush, and Romeo Must Die. He is also trained in theater and continues to do much work on stage.