When Paul Harding won the 2010 Pulitzer for Tinkers, he was a literary unknown who had all but abandoned hopes of his debut novel getting published until a tiny independent publisher chanced upon it. That story, about George Crosby, a dying clock- repairer who lived in Maine, heralded Harding as a great new voice, championed by Marilynne Robinson, no less.
But huge success brings huge expectations and Harding’s second book, Enon, which returned to the Crosby family and the same New England landscape, lacked the narrative perfection of Tinkers, despite the beauty of the prose as he explored a father’s collapse after the sudden death of his teenage daughter.
For This Other Eden, Harding tries something that is both startlingly different and reassuringly familiar. Most of the novel is set over a few months in 1911 on Apple Island, a ‘granite pebble in the frigid Atlantic shallows’, across a channel from mainland Maine and up the coast from the tiny town of Enon, Massachusetts.
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