“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, 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“This gorgeously limned portrait about family bonds, the loss of innocence, the insidious effects of racism, and the innate worthiness of individual lives will resonate long afterward.”
– Booklist (starred review)

“Harding’s close-third narration gives shape and weight to the community members’ complicated feelings about their displacement, while his magisterial prose captures a sense of place.”
– Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“Harding summons up lyrical sheets of prose, including one of the most evocative descriptions of a lobster dinner you’re likely to encounter. He has an eye for a striking image… It’s a brief book that carries the weight of history.”
– Kirkus (starred review)

“You could imagine lots of ways a historical novel about this horror might be written, but none of them would give you a sense of the strange spell of This Other Eden — its dynamism, bravado and melancholy.”
– NPR

“This Other Eden is ultimately a testament of love: love of kin, love of nature, love of art, love of self, love of home. Harding has written a novel out of poetry and sunlight, violent history and tender remembering.”
– New York Times

“Harding has a gift for using language with intense precision that evokes his characters’ points of view.”
– Boston Globe

“Harding’s finely wrought prose shows us a community that refuses to see itself through the judgmental eyes of others, a society composed of people who give their neighbors the same latitude to go their own way that they claim for themselves.”
– Washington Post

“The novel impresses time and again because of the depth of Harding’s sentences, their breathless angelic light.”
– Abhrajyoti Chakraborty, The Guardian

“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.”
– Rachel Seiffert, The Guardian

“Harding’s luscious, perfectly knit narrative delivers a sober understanding of human nature and racial hatred.”
– Library Journal

“A lyrical, powerful ode to resiliency and the strength of family.”
– Bangor Daily News

“This is a novel about race, poverty, loyalty and betrayal, the horrors of eugenic science, and the cruelty of the powerful. All of those themes are present. But beyond that, it is a narrative whose poetry and imagery shed light on the inner lives of people with whom readers have nearly nothing, and nearly everything, in common.”
– Christian Century

“This Other Eden is not just a historical novel; it is a lyrical exploration of resilience, loss, and the complexities of the human experience.”
– Gulf News