Some writers discover a territory and mine its riches: think Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Elizabeth Strout’s Maine, Colin Barrett’s small-town Mayo. Paul Harding is one such novelist. His first two books, Tinkers, which won a Pulitzer prize, and Enon, were both set in New England, and within the same family: the Crosbys, descendants of early European settlers on America’s eastern seaboard. In This Other Eden, Harding returns to the same coast. This time, though, he takes us just offshore to Apple Island – and here, “hardly three hundred feet across a channel from the mainland”, we’re among folk his readers will only have glanced in his fiction before.
Harding’s island is named after the apple trees planted by the first settler: “Benjamin Honey – American, Bantu, Igbo – born enslaved – freed or fled at fifteen, only he ever knew – ship’s carpenter, aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his wife, Patience, nee Rafferty, Galway girl, in 1793.” The story proper opens more than a century later, in 1911, with Esther, the great-granddaughter of Benjamin and Patience, and now matriarch of her own clan of Honeys, dozing in her rocking chair, grandchild on her lap, snow falling outside on a chill spring morning.
