Harding won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for ‘Tinkers,’ his first novel.   Still today a relatively unknown writer, this is only his second book in the intervening 13 years.  It’s a winner.  Like ‘Tinkers’, the beauty of the power of this book is in its wonderful prose, though the plot, characters, and setting are all powerful.

It’s 1912 and motivated by the misguided eugenics movement, the state of Maine decides to evacuate Apple Island, an isolated community just off shore where an escaped enslaved black man, Benjamin Honey and his family had fled to escape oppression and prejudice 100 years earlier.  Five families live on Apple Island—Black, Indian, mulatto; talented and simple-minded; incestous and virtuous—-but all free, living interdependently, caring for each other, and like Adam and Eve in the original Eden, blissfully ignorant of the hatred and oppression on the main land just a few hundred yards away.  Enter the State, today’s equivalent of the snake, and everything falls apart.

Harding’s prose is lyrical and beautiful.  Here is how the matriarch, Esther Honey describes the unborn child of Bridget Carney, a 16 year old Irish girl who finds her way to Apple Island in search of her baby’s father, one of the Honeys. “So, here is another arrival on our little island, Esther thought.  Our little island on this little earth. This little earth, hung somewhere deep in the fathomless heavens. Here is another arrival—this girl, this child—ripening within her own body the seed of another arrival, another child, each and every life comprehensive, each peculiar, each priceless, and each less than the shadow of a shadow, all cherished or despised, celebrated or aggrieved, memorialized or entirely forgotten.”

Harding has, in ‘Tinkers’ taken a set of vividly drawn characters and a historical plot, and woven them together into a beautiful novel about the loss of innocence than comes with knowledge and the evils of racism, white supremacy, and the misapplication of a false science.  It’s worth reading.