The Farther Shore: A Novel

Summary

"ASTONISHING…As intellectually daring as it is lushly immersive."
—Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

"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. 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 heart-wrenching, 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 rich and evocative material to discuss together.

For fans 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.