East of the Garden

About the Book

She is nine hundred years old and she has never spoken the full story aloud.

Now, with her husband’s journal in her lap and her descendants gathered around the fire, Eve begins. Not the story the tradition recorded — the transgression, the exile, the punishment. The story beneath that one. The interior life the official account needed to keep simple.

East of the Garden is a novel about what it costs to be the first human being who ever had to make sense of what happened to her — and what she discovered, across nine centuries of carrying it, about where the divine actually lives.

Drawing on canonical scripture, Gnostic and apocryphal texts, and rabbinic tradition, East of the Garden follows Eve across nine centuries of exile — her grief, her private theology, her husband Adam’s meticulous journal, and the murder of her son. It follows her to the Eastern Gate she returned to across centuries. It follows her through the long quiet decades of building something from devastation, and into the final nights when she gathers her descendants around a fire and speaks what has never been spoken.

What she discovers — slowly, across a lifetime no human being since has lived — is that the divine she spent nine centuries searching for was never on the other side of the gate. It came with her into exile. It has been interior all along.

Told entirely in Eve’s voice, East of the Garden is literary historical fiction that will appeal to readers who love Marilynne Robinson’s meditative voice, Geraldine Brooks’s historical imagination, and Anita Diamant’s reclamation of biblical women. This is a novel about consciousness, grief, love, and the stubborn human refusal to let suffering be meaningless.

East of the Garden: The Book of Eve is the first volume in Reading Between the Lines, a literary anthology recovering the voices of figures sacred tradition needed to keep symbolic.