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From a pathbreaking writer, a thrilling, form-bending novel about a trans healthcare worker whose carefully built life is suddenly imperiled.
Ro and Liam live in a ramshackle cabin in a secluded stretch of Florida. Neither their home nor their sometimes-tumultuous relationship is what the world would call perfect, but to Ro―newly diagnosed with autism and working as a patient navigator for people seeking gender-affirming care―their life, despite the deeply inhospitable political climate, is a kind of paradise.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what shatters their peace. There's Quentin, the unpredictable teenager for whom Liam and Ro are quasi-parents, who visits on his way to college, where he plans to finally start T. There's the appearance of "Mad Eden," an online fantasy serial about heroic dragon riders that increasingly becomes Ro's obsession. And then there's a seemingly innocuous patient video call that results in consequences both unexpected and grave. This triad of circumstances sends Liam's and Ro's world spinning toward disaster―unless Ro can become the real-life hero their situation demands without betraying who they are and who they love.
With colossal heart and preternatural skill, Morgan Thomas crafts a deliciously destabilizing debut novel that challenges us to confront and reinvent questions of language, sex, prejudice, identity, and the shifting scales of morality. Playing with the possible relationship between autism and time to forge an ingenious new kind of storytelling, Mad Eden imagines, with exhilarating courage, how we might yet joyfully live in a precarious world.
"Brilliant ... Thomas's gorgeously constructed story explores difficulties of love, as Ro, a refreshingly complex protagonist, weighs their idyllic bliss with Liam against their desire to help those in need. This luminous novel is impossible to forget." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In their debut novel, Thomas demonstrates thrilling control of their craft, delivering a story as thoughtfully constructed as it is exhilarating to read. Ro and Liam are as real and compelling as characters come, their relationship providing the tangible fabric of the novel. There is true symbiosis here between form and content ... Radically inventive, compassionate, and perspicacious. Compulsively page-turning." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In a genre-defying debut novel, Thomas has crafted a stunning depiction of what finding joy can look like in a world that means to do you harm ... Led by autistic and genderqueer Ro, the storytelling is at once deeply rooting and starry-eyed. Much like the serial at its heart, Mad Eden has collaged fantasy, science, the political, and the personal into a story unlike any other." ―Booklist
"Mad Eden is unlike anything I've read―a novel of staggering invention and fearless intimacy. Morgan Thomas bends time, myth, and science into a story that is dazzling and devastating, tender and unflinching. It's a book about queer and autistic survival, about care and precarity, about joy insisting on itself in the face of collapse. Sentence by sentence, Mad Eden remakes the world as it tells it. What lingers is not resolution but creation itself: the hum of a book that will not end." ―Morgan Talty, author of Night of the Living Rez and Fire Exit
"Every Morgan Thomas sentence is a shocking, surprising, and devious diamond. They are one of the best prose stylists working today and a true magician of character and place. Mad Eden transported me and changed me." ―Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of Housemates and Fat Swim
This information about Mad Eden was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Morgan Thomas is the author of the story collection Manywhere, which was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Lambda Literary Prize for Transgender Fiction, and the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Their writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and The Yale Review. A graduate of the University of Oregon MFA program, they have also received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and elsewhere.
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