The Farther Shore

Summary

The Farther Shore is a sweeping novel about fathers and sons, memory and race, and the dangerous fictions that shape us—inspired by the true story of Eugene Marais, one of history’s most extraordinary and forgotten minds.

Southern Africa, 1890s. 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 abandons his newborn son and disappears into a remote South African forest—leaving behind his 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 his father’s work has been weaponized. University faculty are mining Eugene’s research to bolster theories of racial hierarchy, and their ambitions are growing darker by the day. Accompanied by a mysterious Jewish graduate student whose fate is becoming entangled with his own, Charles will make an epic journey across continents to heal his fractured past and stop a sinister plot quietly 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 and WWII—The Farther Shore is a heart-breaking, exhilarating novel about memory, love, and identity, and about the vast distances we’ll travel to find our way home.