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"ASTONISHING…as intellectually daring as it is lushly immersive."
— New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, JAMIE FORD
"FASCINATING…an absorbing work of historical fiction and an impressive and welcome debut."
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
TWO TIMELINES. ONE DEVASTATING INHERITANCE. Inspired by the true story of Eugène Marais, one of history's most extraordinary and forgotten minds.
Southern Africa, turn of the twentieth century. Eugene Marais is a brilliant naturalist and iconoclastic journalist whose evolving theories about memory, addiction, and the hive mind are decades ahead of their time. But when tragedy strikes, he disappears into a remote African forest—leaving behind his newborn child and his conscience, and embarking on research that will haunt both their lives.
Thirty years later, his son Charles—now a professor of ancient Buddhist history at Harvard—discovers that the university's most powerful faculty are mining his father's research to bolster theories of racial hierarchy. Accompanied by a mysterious Jewish graduate student whose fate has become entangled with his own, Charles must journey to South Africa to confront his father, heal his fractured past, and stop a sinister plot taking root at the world's most prestigious institution.
Set across two interlocking timelines—from the British concentration camps of the Boer War to the rising shadow of the Third Reich—THE FARTHER SHORE is a heartbreaking, exhilarating novel about memory, love, and identity, and about the vast distances we'll travel to find our way home.
THE FARTHER SHORE explores questions that outlast a single life: what a son owes a parent who left him behind, and what a father owes the child he abandoned; how science can be used to heal or destroy; and how faith, grief, and forgiveness can cross generations. It’s a novel about inheritance in every sense—of genius and of guilt, and of the violence that colonialism and fascism leave in their wake—and it offers book clubs and reading groups plenty of rich and evocative material to discuss together.
For readers of Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone, Daniel Mason's North Woods, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being.
EARLY REVIEWS
"An astonishing reimagining of the life of Eugene Marais, The Farther Shore is as intellectually daring as it is lushly immersive. Seth Fleisher renders history with a decadent richness—each page steeped in atmosphere, obsession, and unease—while excavating the dangerous fictions of race and the seductive machinery of rising fascism. What emerges is not just a portrait of a man, but a mirror held up to our own moment: a world still grappling with identity as both inheritance and invention."
—Jamie Ford, NYT bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
"In a rich and visceral style akin to Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, this novel asks profound questions about memory and instinct in a cross-continental tale of father and son that is deeply moving and unforgettable. Set mostly in South Africa in the early decades of the 1900s—with that new nation recently ravaged by British concentration camps and twisting toward the ugliest of human beliefs—The Farther Shore tells of Eugene Marais, a real-life doctor and lawyer whose passion was furthering Darwin’s work, and his son, Charles, whom Eugene abandoned after his beloved wife died in childbirth. Charles teaches ancient Buddhist texts at Harvard in the 1930s, when the university is embracing Nazi fascism and researching a mode of social control based on the misuse of Eugene’s studies. On discovering this, Charles must abandon his hard-won independence and journey back to South Africa to meet a father intent on escaping from pain, while he himself finally opens to love."
—Janet Benton, author of Lilli De Jong
“In this achingly relevant debut novel, Seth Fleisher achieves great magic, embodying continents and centuries. Recalling aspects of The English Patient and A Gentleman in Moscow, this rich exploration introduces a cast of fascinating, complex mortals whose voices are accurate not just to history but to the longings of their flawed hearts.”
—EDIE MEIDAV, author of Dogs of Cuba and Crawl Space
Seth Fleisher is an American author whose work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Pearl, the Journal of Anthropological Research, and elsewhere. Based in Berkeley, California, he has worked with the World Bank Group and other NGOs in South Africa, India, and more than 40 other countries, and co-founded a U.S.-based democracy initiative to counter the rising tide of authoritarianism. A former Fulbright scholar in Sri Lanka, Seth did Ph.D. work at Harvard in Buddhist social history, a fellowship at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions, and a B.A. in literature at Swarthmore, where he and his wife first met in a Chaucer seminar. The Farther Shore is his first novel.