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. 

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.

This Other Eden

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