Eden's Shore

by Oisín Fagan

'Fagan is shaping up to be one of the most dazzling and daring stylists around' Guardian, Books of the Year 2025
Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2026

At the close of the eighteenth century, Angel Kelly, an Irishman, sets sail from Liverpool aboard the Atlas with the intention of creating a Utopian commune in Brazil. But when a mutiny takes place on the ship, he finds himself stranded upon the coast of an unnamed Spanish colony in Latin America. In the aftermath, Kelly becomes unwittingly caught up in a series of crises culminating in displacement, rebellion and a deadly game of cat-and-mouse between empires.

Set in an era of global upheaval, Eden's Shore is an epic and intricate tale of greed, revenge and love. Populated by a vivid and rich cast of revolutionaries and pirates, capitalists and aristocrats, sailors and soldiers, slaves and spies, this is a work of staggering ambition and wondrous imagination.

'Visceral, propulsive, kinetic' Colin Walsh, author of Kala

'Wild, dark and free-wheeling ' Ferdia Lennon, author of Glorious Exploits

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Irish Literature, Audiobook, Book Club, Historical

342 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 10, 2025

Reviews

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought the first part of the book describing Angel's voyage was really good. Rather violent but compelling at the same time. Once he arrived in Brazil it all became rather confusing with the focus moving to other characters some of whom I'd assumed were dead. Reading the book was like being in a kind of fever dream. I admired the imagination and the descriptive language (which is why it gets three stars not two) but by the end of the book I was completely confused.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to this after thoroughly enjoying his debut novel Nobber but was unfortunately disappointed.

It starts off promisingly enough, a philandering student in (18th century) London decides to use what remains of an inheritance to join a ship sailing to America so he can set himself up in Brazil. The nature of the ship he traveling on becomes clear and after that events become rather more confusing, with a proliferation of new characters.

By the end I was rather unsure of quite what was going on. The journey was interesting even so.

[Georgina Reads_Eats_Explores · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oisín Fagan’s Eden’s Shore is a bold and ferociously imaginative novel that plunges the reader into the turbulence of the late eighteenth century—a time when empires expanded, revolutions brewed, and the line between idealism and delusion was perilously thin.

At the centre of this sweeping historical epic stands Angel Kelly, an Irishman driven by utopian dreams, who sets sail from Liverpool with grand notions of founding a commune in Brazil. It’s a noble ambition, but one that’s quickly undone by a mutiny aboard the Atlas, leaving him marooned in an unnamed Spanish colony on the edge of the known world.

What follows is a sprawling, intricately layered narrative that explores the collapse of ideals in the face of realpolitik, violence, and the ever-churning machinery of colonial power. Fagan populates his pages with an extraordinary array of characters—revolutionaries and pirates, capitalists and aristocrats, enslaved people, spies, and soldiers—each sketched with vivid intensity. This is not a world of moral binaries but one riddled with compromise, betrayal, and the desperate search for agency in the shadow of empire.


The novel’s scope is staggering, but what’s most impressive is Fagan’s control of tone and texture. His prose is dense, lyrical, and dreamlike yet unflinchingly visceral. The writing is drenched in dark wit with a philosophical propensity and a deep awareness of colonial entanglements that lends the novel both urgency and depth.

Edens Shore is messy, magnificent, and mad. It is historical fiction, but like nothing you've read before. It demands attention and rewards it generously. With this work, Fagan establishes himself not only as a writer of great ambition but as a singular voice capable of reimagining history through a lens that is as unflinching as it is humane.

Many thanks to the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy via NetGalley. As always, this is an honest review.

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

The man had green eyes, blonde hair, and stubble so fair that it was as though his face were the vacant colour of death.

‘Are you German?’ Llewyn asked.

[Doug · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fagan's debut novel, Nobber I gave 4.5 stars to, taking off half a star for a few minor quibbles - namely the lack of a strong throughline (I noted it seemed more like interconnected short stories than a novel) and a tendency to have a surfeit of characters left offstage for far too long and then reintroducing them at a much later date - when I, for one, have virtually forgotten who they are.

These two faults are massively even MORE of an issue with this, which mightily suffers from 'second novel curse'. The purported protagonist, one Angel Kelly, takes center stage in the first 60 pages, then literally disappears for 200 pages. I often confused characters - and it didn't help that two semi-major ones are named Marianne and Mariam - both inexplicably males.

Worse, even though there is SOME gorgeous prose again, more often there are long stretches of meaningless gobbledygook, the grotesquery is intensified, and I am not even sure what the author is trying to say here - colonial capitalism is bad? ... duh! Seems many people abandoned this mess, and I was tempted to do so also at several points. Disappointing end to 2025.

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fagan’s debut novel, Nobber, indicated he was a young writer to keep an eye on, and his follow-up confirms that.

This time, the Irishman takes his readers on an adventure on the high-seas in the late eighteenth century. The protagonist, is an educated but naïve young Irishman who spends all he owns on a piece of land in Brazil, dreaming of building a city there away from the violence, poverty and hunger of life in Ireland. However, he meets with all sorts of bloody mayhem, in a page-turning tale of deception, conflict and strife.

This is a period of history of great upheaval, and lends itself well to Fagan’s style of writing. It’s a step up from Nobber in that there is more action, but over ambitious in the amount of threads that he keeps going. Addressing the slave trade, the genocide of the native population, the ruthless exploitation by capitalists from the north, and bloody revolution, all drenched in poverty, squalor and mindless violence, there’s enough going on. That he resorts to occasional fever dream, serves little purpose other than to baffle and add length to an already high page count.

Overall though, it’s another success, and interesting to see which period of history Fagan will take us to next.

[ceil ward · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF @ 65%

I received an ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for a review. Thank you so much!

I really liked the concept of this book. I liked the description, and the cover. I was just really hoping for more cohesion overall, though. The different plot lines were a lot to keep track of, and I had a hard time telling the characters apart, because there were a LOT of them.

However, the descriptive language was beautiful! It was very visceral, and I audibly gasped or said “ew” out loud at several points. I just wish the same energy had been poured into a more cohesive plot.

I’m sure this book is for somebody, even though it unfortunately wasn’t for me.

[Aaron Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

*I loved this book so much I co-hosted a chapter-by-chapter read along on Bookies’ Favourite bookclub podcast to help digest it*

My favourite book!

The lyricism & depth that Fagan weaves through this historical epic had me (and still does) re-reading over & over discovering new details on every page.

A feat to tackle, this novel requires effort & determination which rewards the reader in turn.

Split across 3 parts, 5 complete chapters & numerous protagonists. The ensemble cast of characters each add their unique personality to the story.

You could interrogate every page. Investigate the themes & the stories beneath the story.

Not an easy read, but a challenge worth taking on

[Jason McKinney · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/12 stars.

This was some batshit lunacy. The first part made sense and then it was less and less coherent as it went along. I still enjoyed it though because, boy, can Fagan write. One critic called this "a maritime version of Blood Meridian" and I think that's pretty accurate. I would say this might be a teensy bit more hopeful than Cormac McCarthy but not by much. I didn't end up liking it as well by the end as I thought I would but that's because the characters all become kind of a muddle (who was who again?) and it doesn't really stick the landing. It's still a good read in terms of experimental fiction though. I'm interested in reading more of Fagan's work, too.

[Elliott · Rating 2 out of 5]

this was so unengaging and incoherent that i had literally no idea what was happening half of the time. i thought the first part of the story was fairly interesting and the cover art is amazing so it’s disappointing that the writing ruins it.
the main character disappears after about 50 pages and only returns towards the end of the book so there was about 200 pages where i was left wondering whose story i was following.
i don’t hate this book but it wasn’t an enjoyable read and i just felt confused throughout reading it because it doesn’t have a cohesive plot.

[Ruben · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A writer set out to do whatever the hell he wants" it says on the back of my edition and in fact this is what I thought on virtually every page of this exhausting novel. It couldn't care less about the reader or the rules of writing a novel and it makes it surprising, impressive, confusing and maddening in equal measure. I am not even going to try to summarise the plot - it can only create wrong expectations.

[Richard Russell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a bit like modern art. You may question whether it makes sense or whether the creator has initiated an 'Emperor's clothes' moment. It's so damned complicated and all over the place. Coincidently I recently slogged my way through Conrad's, Heart of Darkness which is a similarly complex novel on the same topic (different continent). I struggled more with Eden's Shore to be honest. That said it's high quality writing and if you are blessed with the virtue of patience and stick with it, you'll navigate a probable modern classic.

[Kayleigh Sirrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely incomprehensible but I haven't been focusing much on reading this week so maybe that's why! Gorgeously written tho!

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clever but convoluted.

[Benedetta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Went over my head :/

[A Fernandes · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise was promising, and the environment lively! Avid descriptions, and Fagan seems to have a skill for writing graphical gore. Which isn't the most pleasant but I have to give it to him that it's well executed .

The main problem is for the most of the book, I have no idea what's going on. Repeatedly. It takes pages to make sense of what's happening and there's no coherent storyline to keep one excited with anticipation of what's next. Also the protagonist we're first introduced to is painfully daft which make the first chapters a bit annoying to read.

I am sure more can be said on the violence in this book since there is plenty of it to go around, in various shapes and sizes, but I'll leave it at that.

— A F

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult to know what to say on this one. I loved the language. Much of it reminded me of Cormac McCarthy - especially redolent of Blood Meridian. But as to the story - I struggled to make head nor tail of it. Multiple characters coming at you from different directions and at different times proved, for me, to be utterly confusing. In the end, I just gave up trying to make any sense of it and just enjoyed the text. A strange but quite enjoyable read.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

An impulse buy and an important lesson that pretty cover does not equal good book. enjoyed first half but completely lost track when they got to brazil. too many characters to keep track of, and was confused as to whether they were dead or alive. ploughed through but don't know whether it was worth it.

[Caitlin Davies · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

2.5/5*

[Gayle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colonial acid novel

[nell]

oh oisin…how did we end up here…

really enjoyed nobber so i had reason to believe id enjoy fagans second book but i just cannot drag myself through any more of this, sorry. i think he has a clear vision of what he’s trying to do and im not judging that, but its just doing nothing for me. edens shire reads like absurdist comedy historical fiction without the comedy…its so bizarre that i found its tone impossible to gauge, but once i realised i was expected to take it seriously i just tapped out. i dont think it could be written less engagingly. im not saying he ought to have packed it full of jokes, but just that this style and this tone did not work for me. just over a third of the way in and getting little in the way of theme or message beyond colonialism is bad, which—anyone who needs to read a book to be shown that in 2026 is not someone picking up oisin fagans sophomore novel.

it’s also written in an incredibly jarring, irritating purple-prose style. I genuinely do not remember this from nobber, i don’t know if that’s because the style was different, or it was the same but it just didn’t annoy me then. we spend so, so much time on describing the light and the water and the vegetation, long passage that are so clunkily put together they still fail to immerse:


‘from over the sandbank that bordered the mouth of the river came some scattered barking nestled amidst the broader threshing of the sea that spilled against the shore.’

‘they darkly swirled themselves into the form of a gentle whirl’

they darkly swirled themselves? did they swirl themselves into a whirl or whirl themselves into a swirl? im sorry, im not even trying to make out there is necessarily any grammatical or structural cardinal sin going on with this one, theres definitely a dream-like feel it’s attempting to create and i guess his prose is in service of that, it just pissed me off.

bottom line is life is too short to dedicate two hundred more pages into this book i am not enjoying and do not gaf aboutttt. im so sad i love historical fiction i love absurd historical fiction but this was just such a litany of dull dull characters rendered in dull prose in situations i did not care about. freeing myself 🙏🙏🙏

[Olly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Concrete on the violence. Vague on everything else. Unclear what the author was trying to achieve.

When plot is secondary, strong character development, insight into underexplored corners of history, a probing look at darker human instincts, or sheer writing style could all have made this a great book.

Alas, it was hard to pick up on any of that, and the dreamlike style didn't help.

Not all of it is dreamlike. Violence is recorded in meticulous detail. We are shown every grotesque act inflicted or endured. Murderous acts are commonplace, often without rhyme or reason. If the author can be so concrete about physical brutality, why not extend the same clarity to his characters?

Dialogue in particular is frustrating. It tends to fall into one of two patterns: characters talking past each other in flat contradiction, or slipping into poetic soliloquy. Despite some fun with language barriers, they all talk in the same patterns and blur together.

Is this a saga on colonialism? The brutalising effect of an unbounded continent? Humanity’s innate savagery? Hard to be sure because so much of what happens appears to be random.

That leaves the prose itself. Some may find the style a redeeming feature. I found the relentless similes tiresome. The nature of light, the shadow, waves on the ocean, the glimmering haze of hot days are all dwelt upon repeatedly. I know what the sea looks like! It's the rest that needs some better depiction. Without that, it feels like a missed opportunity.

For a character-driven historic saga set in the Brazilian hinterland, Crooked Plough by Itamar Vieira Junior is a good shout.

[Christopher Burke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found Eden’s Shore enjoyable overall, although “enjoyable” is perhaps an odd word for a novel this harrowing. Its portrayal of the colonial project is often brutal, but also deeply compelling, particularly in the way it attempts to render Indigenous experience and the lives of people of colour within a world being violently reordered around them.

As others have noted, I did sometimes struggle to follow the plot and its narrative progression. Yet I also came to think there was something to be said for simply surrendering to the story without constantly demanding clarity, structure or conventional momentum from it.

The lyricism of Fagan’s prose more than compensates for some of that confusion. At its best, the writing creates an almost dazzling disorientation — a persistent sense of dread, instability and anxiety that feels entirely appropriate to the scale of trauma being enacted through colonisation and white settlement in the New World.

My greater reservation is that the descriptive power of the prose is not always sufficient, in itself, to provide a clear sense of place or historical context. Readers without some prior knowledge of the relevant histories and events may occasionally find themselves unmoored in ways that feel less intentional.

Despite those flaws, I suspect parts of this book — particular scenes, images and moments — will stay with me for some time. I’m glad I read it, and I admire the attempt to create a fragmentary, disorienting but still compelling mode of historical storytelling.

3/5 🌊📚

[Rose Gan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely not a book for everyone. Eden’s Shore is a fever dream of a novel that begins with a young man on his way to Brazil to find a new peaceful society but who mistakenly finds he has accepted passage on a slave ship. From there onwards, events begin to quickly fragment. There is a slave mutiny, a shipwreck followed by sanctuary amongst an indigenous community. But the narrative no longer continues in a linear fashion.

Our main characters disappear (reappearing later from time to time both in the future and in flashback) to be replaced by new even more malevolent figures set against the powerless and innocent villagers. Every subsequent section of the book jolts us from one place and group of players to another with confusing often dreamlike jumps in time and place. But the one central theme is depicted with clarity: the awful reality of colonialism - with the added lens of the Irish role in it.

Progressively less a narrative fiction and more a nightmarish metaphor on hopelessness and lack of agency in the face of corruption and power, Eden’s Shore finally ends more in Hell than Eden. It is a novel of uncompromising brutality, vicious inhumanity and yet has moments of startling beauty and love of mankind. It is, however, a difficult book to recommend. A somewhat flawed masterpiece.

[Daniel Rees · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird, violent & inventive.

Eden’s Shore is a wild ride that takes the reader on an adventure through the late 18th century touching on colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade. The first third was an adventure, the second third, quite poignant and the last third wild and fantastical.

I agree with some reviews about the jarring change in story and characters, which for me made it difficult at times to keep up with what was going on, especially in the last third that flits between reality and fantasy.

The narrative brushes with a literary feel on occasions but not enough to affect the story, and the writing for the most part is deliciously descriptive. The only reason I’ve dropped a star is that, while I feel I understood the full meaning of the story (and the ending) to some extent, I don’t feel 100% satisfied that I understood what Fagan was trying to achieve, which speaks more about me as a reader than the author himself.

Overall, a fun, violent narrative full of beautiful prose that bases itself in innovative and creative storytelling.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fagan further proves himself as a prose stylist of immense talent. This might get labeled as “historical fiction” but only in so far as, like Pynchon, he seems to be placing his works at junctions of history where everything balances upon a precipice and the future might take any direction, but unlike Pynchon he keeps the zoom claustrophobically tight, inducing a feverish perspective, even as we move between a wide range of pov characters. This results not in a plotless novel, but certainly not a plot-first kind of novel. More than anything, the language carries it.

The prose is appropriately visceral for its topic of colonial violence. A gilding of enlightenment philosophy papers over deep wells of horror, but even so it is not a book without humor, often derived from the idiocy of its characters, or misunderstandings caused by the mixing of the world’s languages in this South American colony. That’s a difficult balancing act, but Fagan has the talent to pull it off.

[Gem]

I DNF’ed this book at 30%. The first part reminded me a bit of a dark Pirates of the Caribbean and had me hooked at the start. But once Angel Kelly reaches the shores of a Spanish colony after the shipwreck, we follow multiple different characters and it became difficult for me to keep up or remain interested.

I put the book down as another character, Chuck Benjamin enters the story - and I went back to read the description of the book to find out it might not be about any of these characters really, but about Esa (who I’m sure we’ve met by this point but I couldn’t remember).

This epic tale will be for someone, and I enjoyed the writing style - but it was just too vast a story for me and so I won’t be finishing.

[Gurldoggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mad epic of colonialism and rebellion in 1700's Latin America. Dozens of characters ranging from idealistic adventurers to cynical capitalists to revolutionary natives circle and engage with each other - often violently- as they try to make sense of a rapidly changing New World. The story is all over the place - on a slave ship, in a luxury hotel, at an Indian religious ceremony. The episodes pivot wildly from humor to horror to political drama, always beautifully written and amazingly entertaining. One of the many pleasures is the incredible assortment of accents and dialects that define the dozens of characters - Germans speaking Spanish, Welshmen speaking French, sailors and soldiers from across the planet speaking all manner of manic musical English. Old fashioned in its efforts to create a world, very modern in its representation of diverse viewpoints, this is a marvel of a novel.

[Shastri Akella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fagan is a masterful storyteller, and I have read and taught all of his works so far -- from The Hierophants, which won the Penny Dreadful prize, to his hypnotic story collection, Hostages, to his most recent novel, Nobber that is set during the bubonic plague in Ireland and with which Eden's Shore, getting published on April 10, shares the DNA of an epic scope. It covers a wider geography, and is every bit as magical and twisted and, ultimately, humane, as I have come to expect Fagan's work to be.
Highly recommend!

[Olivier Santamaria · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book really difficult to read. While the beginning of the book is somewhat promising, insofar as the story unveils the full horrors of the slave trade, it then descends into a series of unrelated and confusing stories with myriads of different characters and a chaotic narrative. I could not wait to finish it and move on to something else. At times I found myself totally lost, or uninterested or totally frustrated at the lack of structure and cohesion to the story line which made reading this book more of an effort than a pleasure.