"This Other Eden" by Paul Harding - Historical Fiction Book Club - Past Titles

About the Author: Paul Harding

Paul Harding is an American author known for his novels and contributions to contemporary literature. Here's a brief biography:

Background: Paul Harding was born on February 4, 1967, in Wenham, Massachusetts, USA. He has a diverse background and has worked in various fields, including as a drummer and in the bread industry.

Education: Harding earned his MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and later completed a Master of Fine Arts in Boston University's creative writing program.

Career: Before gaining recognition as a novelist, Paul Harding worked as a rock drummer and also spent time in the bread industry, working as a bread truck driver and a bread salesman. He transitioned to writing and teaching later in his career.

Notable Works: Paul Harding is best known for his debut novel, "Tinkers," which was published in 2009. The novel explores themes of memory, family, and the passage of time. "Tinkers" received critical acclaim and won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel's success brought Harding into the literary spotlight.

Subsequent Works: Following the success of "Tinkers," Paul Harding published his second novel, "Enon," in 2013. "Enon" is a contemplative and emotional exploration of grief and loss.

Writing Style: Harding is praised for his lyrical and poetic prose, and his works often delve into the complexities of human experience. His writing style is known for its introspective and reflective qualities.

Teaching: In addition to his writing, Paul Harding has taught creative writing at Harvard University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Synopsis

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland. During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community's fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who, under the influence of the eugenics-thinking popular among progressives of the day, decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents, and develop the island as a vacation destination. Beginning with a hurricane flood reminiscent of the story of Noah's Ark, the novel ends with yet another Ark. In prose of breathtaking beauty and power, Paul Harding brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters: Iris and Violet McDermott, sisters raising three orphaned Penobscot children; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their brood of vagabond children; the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree; and more. A spellbinding story of resistance and survival, This Other Eden is an enduring testament to the struggle to preserve human dignity in the face of intolerance and injustice.

Historical Timeline

January 1: The Republic of China is established.
April 10: The RMS Titanic, a British passenger liner, sets sail on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. It famously sinks on April 15.
April 15: The RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic Ocean. More than 1,500 people lose their lives.
June 23: Alan Turing, the British mathematician, logician, and computer scientist, is born.
June 28: The Balkan Wars begin as Montenegro declares war against the Ottoman Empire.
July 24: The Ottoman Empire signs the Treaty of Constantinople, ending the First Balkan War.
August 5: The eleventh Olympic Games open in Stockholm, Sweden.
October 5: The Republic of China is officially proclaimed.
October 14: Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt is shot in an assassination attempt while campaigning in Milwaukee. He continues with his speech despite the bullet being lodged in his chest.
October 16: Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia sign an armistice with the Ottoman Empire, marking the end of the First Balkan War.
October 23: First Balkan War: The Battle of Kumanovo concludes with a Serbian victory over the Ottoman Empire.
November 5: Woodrow Wilson is elected President of the United States.
December 14: Roald Amundsen's expedition reaches the South Pole, becoming the first to do so.

MLN Materials

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The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Call Number: FICTION Bennett
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect? Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing.

*ebook & audiobook on Libby
The Vain Conversation by Anthony Grooms; T. Geronimo John
Call Number: FICTION GROOMS
An engrossing novel based on the true story of the 1946 lynching of two black couples in Georgia Inspired by true events, The Vain Conversation reflects on the 1946 lynching of two black couples in Georgia from the perspectives of three characters-Bertrand Johnson, one of the victims; Noland Jacks, a presumed perpetrator; and Lonnie Henson, a witness to the murders as a ten-year-old boy. Lonnie's inexplicable feelings of culpability drive him in a search for meaning that takes him around the world and ultimately back to Georgia, where he must confront Jacks and his own demons, with the hopes that doing so will free him from the grip of the past. In The Vain Conversation, Anthony Grooms seeks to advance the national dialogue on race relations. With complexity, satire, and sometimes levity, he explores what it means to redeem, as well as to be redeemed, when dealing with America's race violence, and he speaks to the broader issues of oppression and violence everywhere.
The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis
Call Number: FICTION Mathis
From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there. Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger. Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint's father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents--families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations--and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him--his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there. Brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America's most fiercely talented storytellers.
Wade in the Water by Nyani Nkrumah
Call Number: FICTION Nkrumah
Set in 1982, in rural, racially divided Ricksville, Mississippi Wade in the Water tells the story of Ella, a black, unloved, precocious eleven-year-old, and Ms. St. James, a mysterious white woman from Princeton who appears in Ella's community to carry out some research. Soon, Ms. St. James befriends Ella, who is willing to risk everything to keep her new friend in a town that does not want her there. The relationship between Ella and Ms. St. James, at times loving and funny and other times tense and cautious, becomes more fraught and complex as Ella unwittingly pushes at Ms. St. James's carefully constructed boundaries that guard a complicated past, and dangerous secrets that could have devastating consequences.
The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah's Book Club) by Colson Whitehead
Call Number: FICTION Whitehead
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood--where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned--Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor--engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey--hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.