Eden
Eden
Ernest Hemingway is in Cuba, trying to finish his final novel The Garden of Eden, a strange and prescient story that explores the boundaries of gender. Penelope is an English professor, who, decades after Hemingway's death, is obsessed with this book, and feels its influence on her own life and her infatuation with a young male student. Catherine is the young wife in The Garden of Eden who speaks to us as she begins to test the confines of her fictional existence. The three narratives entwine and progress to a fascinating and moving conclusion.
EDEN is a beautiful, surprising, novel that makes us think anew about what it is to be a writer, a reader, the nature of attraction, and most fundamentally, how we use our imaginations to form ourselves.
‘A shimmering exploration of sexual obsession, intimacy and the imagination. Sonia Overall dissects love, desire and betrayal with creative daring and tender guile.’
Rebecca Abrams, Touching Distance
‘A beautifully crafted novel, as rich in ideas as in human drama, Eden is both a meditation on and a compelling instance of the story-telling art.’
Josh Cohen, How to Live. What to Do. How Great Novels Help Us Change.
‘An intriguing and ambitious puzzle box of a novel about nothing less than what it is to write, to read and to be read, and one that will stay with me long after closing the final page.’
Wyl Menmuir, The Many, Fox Fires
‘A stylish, subtle and playful novel which investigates how novels, and the ideas they contain, reverberate through disparate lives and cross the boundaries of time and physical space.’
Alice Jolly, Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile
‘In a braid of three startling, elegant narratives, Eden confronts the limits of desire, agency, and freedom. Sonia Overall’s novel fearlessly breaks Hemingway open and forms him anew.’
Isobel Wohl, Cold New Climate
‘A novel that knows its subject. The Hemingway segments seem to emanate from the writer himself. You can almost feel the scratch of his pencil on the page.’
Danny Rhodes, FAN