This Other Eden (1)

Extracts

Extract: This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Enon

The second beautiful, poetic novel from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers.

Harding’s prose is perfect – simple, sharp and creative.

Harding writes with superb sensitivity about the mental and physical effects of a broken heart.

A hypnotic portrayal of loss and resilience . . . Harding is an extraordinary writer, for the intoxicating power of his prose, the range of his imagination, and above all for the redemptive humanity of his vision . . . That Enon is a work of fiction that feels authentic as memoir makes it all the more astonishing.

An extraordinary follow-up to the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Tinkers…His prose is steeped in a visionary, transcendentalist tradition that echoes Blake, Rilke, Emerson, and Thoreau, and makes for a darkly intoxicating read.

I don’t think I’ve read anything quite so strangely moving for a very long time. Such a relief to know there are still writers around who can write about real people, and who notice the world around them, and can turn that into exquisite art. Unbearably tense, but so rewarding as well … every snatch of dialogue seemed pitch-perfect.

Harding’s skillful whipsawing of the reader from the surreal to the quotidian is the best writing he’s done ... Beautifully turned: Harding has defogged his style a bit and gained a stronger emotional impact from it.

Gorgeous and haunting … Harding’s second novel again proves he’s a contemporary master and one of our most important voices.

[A] compulsive read … it’s so delicately written that you can’t help but marvel at Harding’s enormous skill

This is a novel that just requires concentration, is all, and it repays that concentration with writing that is both beautiful and thoughtful.

Enon distils life in small-town New England with the same specificity and grace that Faulkner brought to small-town life in the rural South.

Harding’s elegiac prose is well suited to chronicling the corrosive power of despair

This is a harrowing and a painfully honest representation of mourning the loss of a loved one, but it is also well balanced with the story of the Crosbys’ life in Enon before the tragedy

A powerful second novel … dedication to describing the smallest of details with evocative yet pungent flair hasn’t escaped the latest novel.

[Harding’s] skills reside in creating fully realised and pleasingly odd characters, in engineering surprising and beautiful sentences, and in the eye he has for the minor details of life … Harding is an author who sees the small things others miss … Examining the details of the lives of strangers is Paul Harding’s project and his gift. Hypersensitive to the particulars of ‘this awful miracle of a planet’, alert to every smudge on the consciousness of his narrator, he puts us into a stranger’s shoes and makes us feel, for 238 exquisitely compressed pages, what it might be like to lose everything we love.

This is a harrowing tale and a painfully honest representation of mourning the loss of a loved one. It is well balanced. Not by any means a book to lift the spirits, but a compulsive read.

Enon is a beautifully written book … every page is masterful … a harrowing but deeply worthwhile journey.

Death is an absurd fate, no less harrowing for being inevitable. But the death of a child is the stuff of madness. This is the blow that begins Enon, a beautifully melancholic new novel by Paul Harding…All this sounds heavy-going. Yet Mr Harding ensures that Charlie, despite his sorrow, is still good company. Even as he slides further into despair, his perception warped by grief and drug addiction, Charlie wryly observes his own wretchedness…And there is lightness in this narrative…As with Tinkers, the language of Enon glimmers without feeling precious…Mr Harding captures the poignant aches of parenthood, the way a father may marvel at the sloppy grace of his daughter…And he turns the fictional town of Enon into a vital, storied, memorable place, well worth visiting.

Harding maps his protagonist’s broken inner world in fine, elegiac prose

A bittersweet mixture of bleakness and beauty

Hailed as a masterpiece, Tinkers, Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, is a modern classic. Here, in Enon, Harding follows a year in the life of Charlie Crosby as he tries to come to terms with a shattering personal tragedy. Grandson of George Crosby (the protagonist of Tinkers), Charlie inhabits the same dynamic landscape of New England, its seasons mirroring his turbulent emotional odyssey. Along the way, Charlie’s encounters are brought to life by his wit, his insights into history, and his yearning to understand the big questions. A stunning mosaic of human experience, Enon affirms Paul Harding as one of the most gifted and profound writers of his generation.

Tinkers

WINNER OF THE 2010 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

Wonderful, lyrical . . . Triumphant . . . A beautiful, moving and elegiac lament on the human condition . . . Hypnotic.

Brilliantly realised . . . a reminder of how rich the written language can still be

Prepare to be seduced... Beguiles from the opening sentence ...This little novel is a wonder

An expert piece of historical and psychological archaeology, which unpicks the intricacies of ordinary life while also asking the terrifying, unanswerable, yet endlessly fascinating questions that haunt us all

A dense, elegiac and richly imagined piece of remembering...Life-affirming and visceral in its detail.

'Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls.'

Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead and Home

'Tinkers is not just a novel - though it is a brilliant novel. It's an instruction manual on how to look at nearly everything...Read this book and marvel.'

'Tinkers is a remarkable piece of work.'

Landscape is evoked by Harding in fine poetic sentences...Different voices from the past speak to each other and create an intricate patchwork quilt of memories...Through memory, time can become curiously compressed or drawn out, and one of Harding's achievements is to capture this sense of malleable time...The novel moves towards a silent climax, giving us a strong sense of memory as "atmospheres" that touch all of us.

The arcane-yet-timeless language he uses is so unique that it defies description...A remarkable discovery...Tinkers is so lyrical, so effortlessly, unassumingly musical that it's practically begging to be read out loud. Harding manages to cram more poetry into his most seemingly functional, throwaway sentences than most poets manage in several slim volumes and I, for one, can't wait for the audiobook version of Tinkers to hit the shops...Tinkers consists of key moments in the lives of its protagonists rendered with searing intensity, interspersed with snatches of poetry and extracts from a (fictitious) clockmaker's manual...The resulting heap of broken images is one that TS Elliot would have recognised...A slippery, pleasingly oblique book.

A miniaturised family saga...Harding's writing has many virtues. His descriptions of spring flowers...have something of Thoreau about them. There are echoes, too, of Whitman's celebratory catalogues and of Robert Frost's scrupulously bleak verse narratives. A fine passage about an abandoned house brings its long dead builders with their "catastrophic voices" and its current ruin into the span of a single sentence...A sense of mutability is beautifully realised in the phrase "the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow".

A dense, short meditation on memory, time and legacies passed on from generation to generation...A collage of fragmented histories across three...Poetic language is the driving force in this story...Harding is particularly strong on the natural world as he picks apart a relationship between father and son; in this oddly uplifting book, the time and space they occupy is merely a small part of a vividly described pastoral landscape in which nature endures where man will not.

Immaculate, clever, clinical and alarmingly precise...The book is packed with the kind of imagery that fuels serious American fiction.

Paul Harding

The Pulitzer prize-winning author's gifts have found their fullest expression . . . [This Other Eden] impresses time and again because of the depth of Harding's sentences, their breathless angelic light

Masterful . . . This Other Eden is 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

Harding's new novel is suffused with the tremulous imagery and soaring imagination that won him the Pulitzer Prize . . . Exquisite

Masterful . . . This Other Eden is 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.

Harding's new novel is suffused with the tremulous imagery and soaring imagination that won him the Pulitzer Prize . . . Exquisite.

Rich and full-bodied in its lyricism, Harding's novel, too, is part warning, part memorial, but perhaps above all, reinforces the power of art to bring us into sympathy with strangers' lives.

Harding invites comparisons with authors such as William Faulkner, Robinson and even Elizabeth Strout . . . This Other Eden . . . begs to be widely read.

This Other Eden is ultimately a testament of love: love of kin, love of nature, love of art, love of self, love of home . . . The humans he has created are, thankfully, not flattened into props and gimmicks, which sometimes happens when writers work across time and difference; instead they pulse with aliveness, dreamlike but tangible, so real it could make you weep.

Powerful . . . a moving indictment of a shocking episode in America's past that is rendered in lyrical prose.

[Harding] writes with the gravitas of a mythmaker . . . The pace of Harding's storytelling is stately, his descriptions, even of small events, gorgeous . . . This Other Eden is beautiful and agonizing.

Beautiful . . . Perhaps the chief wonder of this novel is its vivid depictions of a community that is loving, longstanding, peculiar, full of surprises, filled with history, both dark and joyous and above all, functional and self-sustaining - until as has happened so many times and so many places, someone comes along to mess it up.

In boldly lyrical prose, This Other Eden shows us a once-thriving racial utopia in its final days, at a time when race and science were colliding in chilling ways. In the stories of the Apple Islanders - especially that of Ethan Honey, spared a destructive fate because of his artistic gifts and his fair skin - we are made to confront the ambiguous nature of mercy, the limits of tolerance, and what it means to truly be saved. A luminous, thought-provoking novel.

Rachel Seiffert, author of A Boy in Winter

Harding, who won a dark-horse Pulitzer Prize for Tinkers, again demonstrates his gifts for concision and compassion in a narrative that balances historical fact with fully drawn characters. . . . Sure to be a standout of 2023.

There is no writer alive anything like Paul Harding, and This Other Eden proves it: astonishingly beautiful, humane, strange, interested in philosophy and the heart, stunningly written. It's about home, love, heredity, cruelty, and the very nature of art, so completely original it's hard to know how to describe it in a mere blurb, by which I mean: you must read this book.

Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Souvenir Museum

Tender, magical, and haunting, Paul Harding's This Other Eden is that rare novel that makes profound claims on our present age while being, very simply, a graceful performance of language and storytelling. Here is prose that touchingly holds its imagined island community in a light that can only be described as generous and dazzling. I have not read a novel this achingly beautiful in a while, nor one in which the fate of its characters I will not soon forget.

An exquisite book which is both intimate and epic. The writing is polished, precise, luminous. A beautiful testament to people, and whole ways of life, which are have simply been removed from history, and leave hardly a trace behind.'

'Masterful . . . has much to say to our times' Guardian 
 
'Begs to be read' Spectator 
 
'A luminous, thought-provoking novel' Esi Edugyan, author of Washington Black 
 
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. More than a century later, the Honeys' descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbours. But during one tumultuous summer at the dawn of the twentieth century, one prejudiced missionary lands on the island's shores, disrupting the community's fragile balance with everlasting consequences. 
 
Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding's This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit a world brutally intolerant of difference.

Paul Harding

Praise for This Other Eden

The Pulitzer prize-winning author's gifts have found their fullest expression . . . [This Other Eden] impresses time and again because of the depth of Harding's sentences, their breathless angelic ligh ...

Masterful . . . This Other Eden is 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 ...

Harding's new novel is suffused with the tremulous imagery and soaring imagination that won him the Pulitzer Prize . . . Exquisite

The Pulitzer prize-winning author's gifts have found their fullest expression . . . [This Other Eden] impresses time and again because of the depth of Harding's sentences, their breathless angelic ligh ...

Masterful . . . This Other Eden is 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 ...

Harding's new novel is suffused with the tremulous imagery and soaring imagination that won him the Pulitzer Prize . . . Exquisite

The Pulitzer prize-winning author's gifts have found their fullest expression . . . [This Other Eden] impresses time and again because of the depth of Harding's sentences, their breathless angelic ligh ...

Masterful . . . This Other Eden is 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 ...

Harding's new novel is suffused with the tremulous imagery and soaring imagination that won him the Pulitzer Prize . . . Exquisite

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Extract: This Other Eden by Paul Harding

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