Name: This Other Eden
ISBN: 9781324036296

Paul Harding

This Other Eden

Christy du Preez

Other ideas still, though, were darker, underwater, or he underwater and they above the surface, clear and sharp and focused. He could hear them in his head, feel their weight in his chest and their shapes in his throat, but he was slow of tongue and they went unworded. He knew everyone had the same kind of ideas, but that his thoughts outdistanced his words sooner than with other people- even the words for what he meant when he thought about this hovered above the water- dark, familiar circling birds he could not name. 

taylor miles hopkins

What kind of world would that be, in which a shadow was composed of the same stuff as the girl who cast it, and the blueberries she ate the same stuff as she?

Why don't the stars make any sounds in the winter? Bridget said. 

Their chirping sounds. They only make that sound in the summer.

Ethan was confused for a moment then understood. He answered, I'm not sure. I've wondered about that. I've wondered whether they do make the same sound but their voices somehow get swallowed up in the cold on their way here, or whether they lose their voices in the winter, or whether they change their voices so that we can't hear them but other animals can, or other people on different planets. 

I've seen flowers that red, he said. Strawberries. Cherries. But everything in the world changes colors every second.

The family condensing, imploding, fewer and fewer people, becoming heavier and heavier, until one last woman would stand, dark and wholly compacted, herself begat, she her own mother. She her own daughter and sister, all in her one, impossibly condensed and sorrowful body, leaden and involute so when she lay down to die no one would need to bury her. 

Beautifully written, incredibly poetic. Impressive method of switching POVs often without causing confusion and really feeling conceptually intentional. Will tear out your insides. Some of the most powerful samples of prose I’ve read in a while. 

Chris Dailey

Magical realism meets race relations and eugenics in the US. Based loosely on a real island off the coast of Maine where freed slaves intermarried with Irish immigrant in the 19th century, a family is torn apart by misguided and/or malicious intentions from locals. Race and family are the prominent themes along with community, care, education vs intelligence, religion and modernity peppered throughout. Touchingly sad with deep tenderness and low key world building on the fictional island. For a lighter book, it took unusual focus to follow the flowery, and at times, gorgeous prose.