Lived reality and racial equations in this Eden

In the running for the Booker Prize to be announced on Sunday, Paul Harding's This Other Eden’ is about the messy realities of living

- Aditya Manijha

In the opening chapter of Paul Harding's This Other Eden (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), we are told the story of a former slave called Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife Patience, about how circa 1793, they were the first settlers on an island off the coast of Maine. Based on the real-life Malaga Island, the island of Harding's novel is dubbed "Apple Island", after the apple trees planted by Benjamin. In a searing image, we are shown how Patience stitches together a flag from stray bits of the Portuguese flag, the Irish flag, and, of course, the American stars and stripes.

Both the apple tree and the home-made patchwork flag may feel like they are on-the-nose symbols of "dark Americana" (the apple trees, for example, are portentous reminders of "strange fruit", the euphemism used to describe black bodies hanging from trees) but within the framework of Harding's story, they work brilliantly. The novel's epigram tells us the real-life history of Malaga and, tin 1912, a tiny multi-racial community living peacefully on the island was destroyed, torn asunder by governmental tyranny-black and/or mixed-race residents evicted, their children sent to faraway boarding schools, as many as eight residents committed to the mental asylum. This Other Eden is Harding's lush, multi-modal, achingly humane fictionalisation of this atrocity.

America has always had a strong tradition of writers like Annie Dillard, Nicholson Baker and Marilynn Robinson (who, incidentally, taught Harding at Iowa), whose ideas-per-page count is off the charts. Their books demand nothing less than your undivided attention and typically, one reads them 20-30 pages at a time, because of the sheer density of ideas. Harding, too, is a writer who rewards careful, deliberate reading and one who richly deserves a wider readership.