This Other Eden: A tale of paradise gained – and lost

PAUL Harding’s This Other Eden opens with an epigraph telling us that in 1912, the residents of a small mixed-race community – deemed “degenerate” by mainlanders – were forcibly evicted from their island home in the US state of Maine.

While this historical injustice serves as the inspiration for his Booker Prize-nominated novel, its focus isn’t solely tragic. Rather, much of its imaginative energy is gathered towards envisioning the lives and workings within a community that, untouched by mainland prejudices, is animated by a spirit of egalitarianism and unconditional love.

At the turn of the 19th century, former slave Benjamin Honey and his Irish partner Patience settle on the fictional Apple Island, laying the foundations for a lively multi-ethnic community. A century later, the Honey family – descendants of Benjamin and Patience – includes matriarch Esther, who begat her children under harrowing circumstances, and her fair-skinned grandson Ethan, who shows early promise as a painter. They live alongside other families of diverse hues and backgrounds – a veritable microcosm fit to populate an Eden.