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This Other Eden
This Other Eden
Dec 13, 2025 9:22 AM

Author:Paul Harding

This Other Eden

'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.

Reviews

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

—— Observer

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

—— Guardian

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

—— Financial Times

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.

—— Guardian

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

—— Catherine Taylor , Financial Times

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.

—— Daily Mail

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

—— Spectator

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.

—— Danez Smith , New York Times

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

—— Mail on Sunday

[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.

—— Claire Messud , Harper's

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.

—— TLS

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.

—— Esi Edugyan, author of Washington Black

A special book by a rare writer.

—— 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.

—— Los Angeles Times

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.

—— Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man

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.'

—— Alice Jolly

A tragic tale beautifully told.

—— The Scotsman

An argument to read him not only as a fervent critic of totalitarianism, but as a deeply compassionate writer with an extraordinary gift for portraying psychological complexity and sensory detail

—— New Republic

A gripping panorama of the human experience

—— Kenneth Branagh

This first English version of Stalingrad is a triumph on many levels… [Stalingrad] captures a definitive moment… [and Grossman] delivers an enduring tribute to the power of human spirit

—— Ella Walker , Herald

A seething fresco of combat, domestic routine under siege and intellectual debate, it confirms that Grossman was the supreme bard of the second world war

—— Economist, *Books of the Year*

To read Stalingrad is to be immersed in a world where everything is in flux… The reader emerges from his pages exhausted and chastened, but hugely enriched… the translators have done a superb job. If you haven’t read Life and Fate, it would pay to read Stalingrad first and prepare for the marathon of both volume; if you have, Stalingrad is an essential companion’

—— Dougal Jeffries , BJGP

A powerful account of families torn apart by probably the bloodiest campaign in history

—— Janet Margaret Hartley , Geographical

The best thing Salman Rushdie has written in years... One of the richest and most exuberant books he has given us.

—— Scotsman

Rushdie's creation is vivid, compelling, and entirely his own.

—— Daily Mirror

Salman Rushdie is a genius and I wish he could read me a story - or a chapter of his book - every night before bed. The scale and scope of his intellect and his imagination is googolplex.

—— A.M. Homes, author of THE UNFOLDING

It does not resemble any other novel I could name. A major accomplishment by one of our greatest living writers.

—— Michael Cunningham, author of THE HOURS

No one, and I mean no one, can bring an entire world to life... like Salman Rushdie.

—— Gary Shteyngart, author of OUR COUNTRY FRIENDS

Mesmerising and soul-stirring. Victory City is an epic tribute to the power of words as well as the resilience of women. Rushdie is without a peer in proving that literature soars above tyranny and bigotry, and imagination roars louder than censorship

—— Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees

This is Salman Rushdie at his most virtuosic.

—— Hari Kunzru, author of THE IMPRESSIONIST

It will show you the adult world in a whole new light. Only a master storyteller can do that.

—— Jarvis Cocker, author of GOOD POP, BAD POP

A storyteller who reminds that death may take away a lot of things, but never the power of our words.

—— Colum McCann, author of LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN

A capacious and sweeping telling in which writing about the past is a way of also staring dead on at the present.

—— Natasha Trethewey, author of NATIVE GUARD

Victory City stands out as one of the year's literary highlights... that feels like an instant classic.

—— Bea Carvalho, Head of Fiction at Waterstones

Rushdie is an assured storyteller at the height of his powers, revealing once again how important India is as a fount of his imagination.

—— Conversation

Victory City is one of Rushdie's very best novels. It is also a luminous, italicised, vibrant reminder of the possibilities of free expression and of the untrammelled imagination. In this instance, the medium is indeed the message.

—— Tortoise Media

Victory City can, in many ways, be read as an entertaining jaunt through Indian history, though it is history through the kaleidoscopic and sweeping lens of a fairy tale... this brilliantly magical tale.

—— Irish Independent

This sweeping, intricately crafted fairy tale is underscored by very human characters and Rushdie's signature wit.

—— Culture Whisper, *Books to Look Out For 2023*

A grand entertainment, in a tale with many strands, by an ascended master of modern legends.

—— Kirkus Review

Rushdie's magical style unfurls wonders.

—— Washington Post

Rushdie's Victory City is another fabulous novel set in his native India... He's a master who never forgets that the main goal of a storyteller is to entertain rather than educate or pontificate.

—— New York Journal of Books

Rushdie is, above all else...one of the most powerful defenders of story we have... Victory City is a victory for Rushdie - and for every reader who enters its gates.

—— Harper's Bazaar

Rushdie succeeds in creating a kind of incantatory prose that befits the fabulist nature of the story... he can enchant readers like few other writers.

—— Literary Review

This is a man at his full-strength, high-tar best - with his deeply humane worldview, his brilliance at set-pieces and, above all, the thrilling wildness of his imagination on irresistible display.

—— Reader's Digest

With its carousel of shifting politics and history, Victory City is Rushdie's most textured and triumphant wonder tale yet.

—— Hindu

Utterly enchanting.

—— Eastern Eye

Rushdie's return to magic, myth, and India's ancient stories is dazzling. With mercurial prose and vivid renderings, Rushdie never loses us in Victory City's convolutions, but instead builds our trust to travail the many grand events of Pampa's imagined empire.

—— Esquire

A rich, dramatic saga... The many moments of comedy...show Salman Rushdie's storytelling skills and his endearing sense of playfulness... the main feeling the reader gets is of a storyteller enjoying himself.

—— Tablet, *Novel of the Week*

Rushdie is an expert at mixology; he's the DJ Shadow of text with references and allusions to high and low culture from Finnegans Wake to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon... a well-told tale that gets bums on seats.

—— National

There's a magical thread of storytelling running through the veins of each character we meet in this book... a joy to read.

—— UK Press Syndication

A work of great imagination... In Victory City the power of the written word and of the storyteller remain triumphant.

—— NB

Rushdie’s sheer love of fiction is irrepressible.

—— Daily Telegraph, *Books of the Year*

A wonderfully entertaining literary hybrid

—— The Times, *Books of the Year*

Victory City is Salman Rushdie at his imaginative best… sweeping the reader on a journey that feels epic in a mere 320 pages

—— i, *Books of the Year*
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