This Other Eden

In his new book, Paul Harding animates the story of Malaga, an island off the coast of Maine that was once the home of a mixed-race fishing community until the island's inhabitants were evicted by the state in 1912. Harding reimagines that history, transforming it into the fictional Apple Island, where the descendants of a formerly enslaved man, Benjamin Honey, and his Irish wife, Patience, have settled since the late 1700s. "This Other Eden" explores the contours of life on Apple Island in 1911, a little more than a century after the community's founding and on the eve of its destruction.