Details:
- author: Paul Harding
- full title: This Other Eden
- narrator: Edoardo Ballerini
- genre: literary fiction, historical fiction
- topics: #mixedracefamily, #appleisland
- publisher: Recorded Books
- publish date: 24 Jan 2023
- timing: 6:08:00
My Rating of the Audiobook:
- content: 💙💙💙.5
- narration: 💙💙💙💙
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| Goodreads |
My Thoughts:
In the late 18th century, a former slave, Benjamin Honey, and his Irish wife, Patience, found an isolated island where they could live. They planted an apple orchard there. This novel takes place more than a century later, in 1912, and tells the story of their descendants and some neighbors that found a home on the island through the years. Esther is the great-granddaughter of Benjamin and Patience. Now she is the oldest of the Honey family and watches over her son and grandchildren. Biblical references contribute to the atmosphere of this novel. This other Eden is based on true events on Malaga Island.
I didn’t read the Tinkers, Paul Harding’s novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2010, but I was interested in this novel because of the author.
This other Eden is a beautifully written novel about a heartbreaking subject. But unfortunately, it didn’t grab my attention as much as it should have. I often found it pretty slow, and the sentences, even though magnificent, were very long. Because of the above, I am glad I had an audiobook. Edoardo Ballerini is a very good narrator, although his reading was a little faster than usual.
About the Author:
Paul Harding has an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (2000) and was a 2000–2001 Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, MA. He has published short stories in Shakepainter and The Harvard Review. Paul currently teaches creative writing at Harvard. His first novel, Tinkers, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
About the Narrator:
Edoardo Ballerini is a two time winner of the Audiobook Publishers Association’s Best Male Narrator Audie Award (2013, Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter; 2019, Watchers by Dean Koontz). He has recorded nearly 300 titles, including classic works by Tolstoy, Dante, Stendhal, Kafka, Calvino, Poe, Emerson, Whitman and Camus, best-sellers by James Patterson and David Baldacci, modern masterpieces by Tom Wolfe, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and André Aciman, and spiritual titles by The Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hahn.
