Excerpt from This Other Eden by Paul Harding, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The surge struck the innermost of the bay, spilled onto the mainland, dumping the foremost of the ruin it had plowed along the way onto a campsite called Little Shell Cove, where a hundred years later campers still turned up trinkets from the calamity, and the cauldron of wrath doubled back on itself and withdrew, quaffing the people, creatures, pie safes, pews, and catboats it had failed to devour the first time caterwauling off toward the horizon.

The water stopped rising and seemed to pause. It was as if my hand and the sputtering flag were at the center of a great whirlpool guzzling the island down its throat but then the eddying slowed and stopped then began to unwind.

Patience Honey clung to the Penobscot pine under the water, the baby in her arms limp, eyes closed then, asleep against her breast inside the bosom of the sea. Patience looked down the length of the tree, into the garbled dark. Bodies clung to it below. Benjamin. Her cousin and best friend, Shekhinah Goodfellow. Deeper down, the island appeared to move. It began to revolve around the tree, like a dark stone wheel around a wooden axle. It was a whale—circling, nosing at Patience and the other fugitives newly arrived in his kingdom, until he caught sight of an ancient great white shark cruising through the schoolhouse, trolling for drowned children and spinster marms. The whale launched after its prehistoric nemesis and the monsters jetted away from the shallows of the newly drowned world back into the proper abyss.

I could no longer hold my breath. Just as I had to give out and inhale the Atlantic into my lungs and swallow it into my guts like a last meal of seawater soup, the whirlpool began to uncoil from around my hand and the flag and the water began to lower. My arm seemed to rise out of the water, then my head and body, along with the Penobscot pine, too, which rose like the mast of a wrecked ship unsinking. The ship—I mean, the island—and I surfaced and rose above the water and the wind dashed against my face and I gasped at the air and lost hold of the tree.

Excerpted from This Other Eden by Paul Harding. Copyright © 2023 by Paul Harding. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.