The Farther Shore: A Novel
About this audiobook
"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.
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About the author
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 US-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 BA in literature at Swarthmore, where he and his wife first met in a Chaucer seminar. The Farther Shore is his first novel.
Dennis Kleinman has been narrating audiobooks since 2013 and has at least forty titles to his credit. His career began with a biography of a British general, Sir David Fraser, and then transitioned into a series of period romance audiobooks. He has also narrated half a dozen nautical themed audiobooks, as well as South African themed works that include The Lion Seeker and The Zebra Affaire. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.
