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Eden
Ernest Hemingway is in Cuba, trying to finish his final novel The Garden of Eden, a strange and prescient story that explores the boundaries of gender. Penelope is an English professor, who, decades after Hemingway's death, is obsessed with this book, and feels its influence on her own life and her infatuation with a young male student. Catherine is the young wife in The Garden of Eden who speaks to us as she begins to test the confines of her fictional existence. The three narratives entwine and progress to a fascinating and moving conclusion.
Eden is a beautiful, surprising, novel that makes us think anew about what it is to be a writer, a reader, the nature of attraction, and most fundamentally, how we use our imaginations to form ourselves.
Eden is a beautiful, surprising, novel that makes us think anew about what it is to be a writer, a reader, the nature of attraction, and most fundamentally, how we use our imaginations to form ourselves.
280 pages, Paperback
Published July 21, 2022
1 person is currently reading
87 people want to read
About the author
Sonia Overall
14 books10 followersI was born in Ely, the heart of the Cambridgeshire fens, in 1973.
I moved to Canterbury to study at the University of Kent, where I completed a combined BA hons in English Literature and Philosophy.
After my MA I endured the usual rounds of unemployment, underpaid jobs, temping and griping, but I kept up with the writing, penning some more novellas and experimenting with dialogue. I took a job as a lowly bookseller in Waterstone's Canterbury.
After a spell at various levels on the Waterstone's ladder I was taken on by my tireless agent Simon Trewin, and got a lucky break with the lovely Philip Gwyn Jones, then editor of Flamingo and now head of his own publishing house Portobello. A two-book deal followed, and A Likeness and The Realm of Shells were published under the new Fourth Estate / Harper Perennial banner.
I married artist and lecturer James Frost in 2002, who I met in my bookseller days. We have a son, Rowan. Unable to escape the lure of East Kent, we now live in Sandwich.
I moved to Canterbury to study at the University of Kent, where I completed a combined BA hons in English Literature and Philosophy.
After my MA I endured the usual rounds of unemployment, underpaid jobs, temping and griping, but I kept up with the writing, penning some more novellas and experimenting with dialogue. I took a job as a lowly bookseller in Waterstone's Canterbury.
After a spell at various levels on the Waterstone's ladder I was taken on by my tireless agent Simon Trewin, and got a lucky break with the lovely Philip Gwyn Jones, then editor of Flamingo and now head of his own publishing house Portobello. A two-book deal followed, and A Likeness and The Realm of Shells were published under the new Fourth Estate / Harper Perennial banner.
I married artist and lecturer James Frost in 2002, who I met in my bookseller days. We have a son, Rowan. Unable to escape the lure of East Kent, we now live in Sandwich.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 2, 2022
Eden is a new novel by writer and scholar Sonia Overall which forms a dialogue with Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden, a work that was published posthumously 25 years after his death. There are three strands to Overall's Eden: a close third-person view of Hemingway during the later period of his life; a more experimental piece focused on Catherine, a character in Hemingway's novel based on one or more of his ex-wives; and a present day strand that follows university lecturer Penelope as she and one of her students engage with the Hemingway novel and each other. There is a lot to like about this one. It is literary without being avant garde; erudite without being pretentious. It fits nicely with the ethos of publisher Weatherglass Books, a newish press focused on publishing high quality literary works that are overlooked by other presses. I personally lost interest in Hemingway long ago but it was nevertheless interesting to see his later years channeled through Overall's imagination. Tracing how his vulnerabilities and obsessions were reflected in his fiction - and in his readers several generations later - was handled with nuance. Due to my general disinterest in Hemingway, I wasn't personally as engaged with this as I might have been, but the intertextuality is well done and certainly recommended for anyone interested in Hemingway or any of these themes.
July 9, 2022
Eden by Sonia Overall takes its title from Ernest Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, around which the novel revolves. She has said her work is “inspired by the act of reading, the power of books and the dangers of interpretation.”
The novel is told in three (initially) separate story strands, those of:
Penelope, an English Literature professor at a university, mother to an 11-year old boy, her husband often absent on business.
She is lecturing a course on modernism, based around Gertrude Stein, on whose work she is also supposed to be writing a book, but finds herself drawn to Hemingway’s novel instead, as here where she emerges from immersion in the novel’s pages:
She stands, goes into the kitchen, clicks on the kettle. Her knees buckle, her head swims.
She is amazed at herself, at finding herself standing there: the cafe gone, the couple gone, the waiter no longer lingering discreetly, polishing glasses at the bar. She sees her own kitchen as if from some vast distance, the cupboards lining the walls the butcher's block in the corner pendulous with ladles, the clock above the sink. The window is dark, steamed up, a fog fenced by mobbing shapes of trees swaying in the garden.
She doesn't know herself. She doesn't want to know herself. And yet she also senses the terrible clarity of things: sudden and resolute as if after fever. There are the milk bottles, rinsed and ready for the doorstep. So clear in their being that she sees black lines around them, their separateness absolute. The windowsill cluttered with keys and plant pod, a chipped jug for flowers. Every item clear and distinct. She thinks: That line in Joyce's Ulysses. Ineluctable modality of the visible. Physical. She thinks: Joyce always has it. Always.
She says: That is why we read. Says it out loud, to the mixer tap, the inverted globe of her face reflected spoon-like, pink and hideous. That is why we read. The world is too bloody real. It is more than she can bear.
She thinks: Reading and mental note-taking and analysis. Always reading as work, despite herself. How long has it been since she let herself read like this, as she is reading Hemingway and Catherine and David? Immersed, saturated? She has become an anatomist, a specimen collector. She had forgotten how a book can breathe.
This reacquaintance with the book itself results from an encounter with a third-year student Max, studying Hemingway with another lecturer, but who looks to Penelope as a mentor, while she finds herself increasing fantasising about him.
Ernest Hemingway himself, in all his boorishness, over the period 1946-1961, during which he worked on the unfinished novel; and
Catherine Bourne, the female protagonist of Garden of Eden.
This is the most formally ambitious section with Catherine self-aware that she is a character in a novel and that she (initially) owes her existence to Hemingway as an author, and indeed her husband David as narrator.
How does it sound in your head? There is the voice, telling you how to look, to walk, to sit. You have no choice but to listen.
You are made to fit a role. Do not question what he has given you. He, David, Ernest, has the talent. You have the money. You accept this as you would accept having red hair instead of blonde or black or brown, or eyes of two different colours.
And this when, towards the novel’s start, she goes into town and returns with her hair cropped short, a key scene in the book:
You are gone. You have left the page. He, Ernest, knows what you are up to. He, David, has no idea. When you come back to him, David, the changes will have begun.
You cannot be sure what, but you know it is the beginning of something new.
Increasingly Penelope finds herself influenced by Catherine’s example in her own life and loves, Hemingway uses the unfinished book to work through some issues of his own, and Catherine takes agency within the novel itself.
There is one crucial area where Eden departs from Hemingway’s work - in its publication.
The novel is published by the relatively new press Weatherglass Books, this their fifth book and fourth novel, co-founded by the founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, Neil Griffiths, who said at the time that the press was aiming to fill a gap in the literary landscape:
Hemingway’s Garden of Eden was published posthumously in 1987, 25 years after his death, and literary critics have long lamented the editing involved. In The New Republic in March of that year, Barbara Probst Solomon wrote “I can report that Hemingway’s publisher has committed a literary crime”.
In contrast, Overall acknowledges her debt to Weatherglass Books and particularly “to my editors Neil Griffiths and Damian Lanagan for their enthusiasm, encouragement and much-appreciated care of these pages.”
And the resulting novel is a delight. While I’m sure greater familiarity with Hemingway than I have (I’ve not read any of his work and knew little of his life) would yield further treasures, the novel was sufficient unto itself and both cleverly intellectually but also emotionally engaging.
The novel is told in three (initially) separate story strands, those of:
Penelope, an English Literature professor at a university, mother to an 11-year old boy, her husband often absent on business.
She is lecturing a course on modernism, based around Gertrude Stein, on whose work she is also supposed to be writing a book, but finds herself drawn to Hemingway’s novel instead, as here where she emerges from immersion in the novel’s pages:
She stands, goes into the kitchen, clicks on the kettle. Her knees buckle, her head swims.
She is amazed at herself, at finding herself standing there: the cafe gone, the couple gone, the waiter no longer lingering discreetly, polishing glasses at the bar. She sees her own kitchen as if from some vast distance, the cupboards lining the walls the butcher's block in the corner pendulous with ladles, the clock above the sink. The window is dark, steamed up, a fog fenced by mobbing shapes of trees swaying in the garden.
She doesn't know herself. She doesn't want to know herself. And yet she also senses the terrible clarity of things: sudden and resolute as if after fever. There are the milk bottles, rinsed and ready for the doorstep. So clear in their being that she sees black lines around them, their separateness absolute. The windowsill cluttered with keys and plant pod, a chipped jug for flowers. Every item clear and distinct. She thinks: That line in Joyce's Ulysses. Ineluctable modality of the visible. Physical. She thinks: Joyce always has it. Always.
She says: That is why we read. Says it out loud, to the mixer tap, the inverted globe of her face reflected spoon-like, pink and hideous. That is why we read. The world is too bloody real. It is more than she can bear.
She thinks: Reading and mental note-taking and analysis. Always reading as work, despite herself. How long has it been since she let herself read like this, as she is reading Hemingway and Catherine and David? Immersed, saturated? She has become an anatomist, a specimen collector. She had forgotten how a book can breathe.
This reacquaintance with the book itself results from an encounter with a third-year student Max, studying Hemingway with another lecturer, but who looks to Penelope as a mentor, while she finds herself increasing fantasising about him.
Ernest Hemingway himself, in all his boorishness, over the period 1946-1961, during which he worked on the unfinished novel; and
Catherine Bourne, the female protagonist of Garden of Eden.
This is the most formally ambitious section with Catherine self-aware that she is a character in a novel and that she (initially) owes her existence to Hemingway as an author, and indeed her husband David as narrator.
How does it sound in your head? There is the voice, telling you how to look, to walk, to sit. You have no choice but to listen.
You are made to fit a role. Do not question what he has given you. He, David, Ernest, has the talent. You have the money. You accept this as you would accept having red hair instead of blonde or black or brown, or eyes of two different colours.
And this when, towards the novel’s start, she goes into town and returns with her hair cropped short, a key scene in the book:
You are gone. You have left the page. He, Ernest, knows what you are up to. He, David, has no idea. When you come back to him, David, the changes will have begun.
You cannot be sure what, but you know it is the beginning of something new.
Increasingly Penelope finds herself influenced by Catherine’s example in her own life and loves, Hemingway uses the unfinished book to work through some issues of his own, and Catherine takes agency within the novel itself.
There is one crucial area where Eden departs from Hemingway’s work - in its publication.
The novel is published by the relatively new press Weatherglass Books, this their fifth book and fourth novel, co-founded by the founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, Neil Griffiths, who said at the time that the press was aiming to fill a gap in the literary landscape:
For the last five years or so small presses have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting in UK publishing and with much success. But they tend to focus on either formally inventive fiction or translations. The space for core literary fiction has been squeezed and books which are merely excellent can find themselves homeless.
Running the Republic of Consciousness Prize I read hundreds of novels from small presses and loved a great many, but I did feel an absence of novels that were somehow exquisite at the simplest level: great story-telling built up from beautiful sentence-making.
Hemingway’s Garden of Eden was published posthumously in 1987, 25 years after his death, and literary critics have long lamented the editing involved. In The New Republic in March of that year, Barbara Probst Solomon wrote “I can report that Hemingway’s publisher has committed a literary crime”.
In contrast, Overall acknowledges her debt to Weatherglass Books and particularly “to my editors Neil Griffiths and Damian Lanagan for their enthusiasm, encouragement and much-appreciated care of these pages.”
And the resulting novel is a delight. While I’m sure greater familiarity with Hemingway than I have (I’ve not read any of his work and knew little of his life) would yield further treasures, the novel was sufficient unto itself and both cleverly intellectually but also emotionally engaging.
July 29, 2022
The fourth novel and fifth book from Weatherglass is a clever, multi-layered story that I would probably have appreciated more had I read Hemingway.
It has three strands - one follows a present day academic Penelope, who becomes too closely involved with a young student who wants to write about Hemingway and his last novel The Garden of Eden. Another strand follows Hemingway through the complicated gestation of that novel and his other late works, and a third allows some of the novel's characters a life of their own.
I found it an enjoyable read, well written with some interesting ideas.
It has three strands - one follows a present day academic Penelope, who becomes too closely involved with a young student who wants to write about Hemingway and his last novel The Garden of Eden. Another strand follows Hemingway through the complicated gestation of that novel and his other late works, and a third allows some of the novel's characters a life of their own.
I found it an enjoyable read, well written with some interesting ideas.
July 25, 2022
I received this book as part of my subscription to Weatherglass Books. This is the fourth novel they have published.
The title of this book comes from Ernest Hemingway’s “Garden of Eden” and that book and author are central to this novel from Sonia Overall.
The novel begins as three separate strands, but, as you might expect, these gradually start to bleed into one another. In the first narrative thread we meet Penelope. She’s an English Literature professor at a university. Hemingway isn’t her main focus (that’s Stein) but she finds herself drawn to Hemingway’s novel, partly (maybe completely) because she meets a student who is studying Hemingway under another tutor and she (Penelope) finds herself drawn to him (the student, Max). This part of the book is the story of what happens or doesn’t happen between Penelope and Max. This was probably my least favourite of the three parts of the book.
Then there’s a second thread in which the protagonist is Hemingway himself. This is about his struggles to write, about his relationships, about his personal life.
The third strand to the book is perhaps the most eye-catching and unusual. The protagonist is Catherine Bourne, the main female protagonist in Garden of Eden. However, here Catherine is aware that she is a character in a Hemingway novel and we read of her efforts to break free from Hemingway’s control. This was probably my favourite of the three parts of the book and it raised the most questions in my mind as I read.
So, this is a book about reading, about writing and about being read. And it’s about how one of those things can influence the others.
I found the writing style to be very “easy on the eye”. I enjoyed reading the book but without ever feeling much in the way of tension. I was expecting a story of “sexual obsession, intimacy and the imagination” (taken from the front cover blurb) to be a bit darker or a bit tenser than it actually felt as I read it.
I would like to see a review of the book from someone who knows Hemingway’s work and life. I know neither and wonder if that impacts my perception of the book.
That said, I enjoyed reading this and it’s another quality publication from Weatherglass.
The title of this book comes from Ernest Hemingway’s “Garden of Eden” and that book and author are central to this novel from Sonia Overall.
The novel begins as three separate strands, but, as you might expect, these gradually start to bleed into one another. In the first narrative thread we meet Penelope. She’s an English Literature professor at a university. Hemingway isn’t her main focus (that’s Stein) but she finds herself drawn to Hemingway’s novel, partly (maybe completely) because she meets a student who is studying Hemingway under another tutor and she (Penelope) finds herself drawn to him (the student, Max). This part of the book is the story of what happens or doesn’t happen between Penelope and Max. This was probably my least favourite of the three parts of the book.
Then there’s a second thread in which the protagonist is Hemingway himself. This is about his struggles to write, about his relationships, about his personal life.
The third strand to the book is perhaps the most eye-catching and unusual. The protagonist is Catherine Bourne, the main female protagonist in Garden of Eden. However, here Catherine is aware that she is a character in a Hemingway novel and we read of her efforts to break free from Hemingway’s control. This was probably my favourite of the three parts of the book and it raised the most questions in my mind as I read.
So, this is a book about reading, about writing and about being read. And it’s about how one of those things can influence the others.
I found the writing style to be very “easy on the eye”. I enjoyed reading the book but without ever feeling much in the way of tension. I was expecting a story of “sexual obsession, intimacy and the imagination” (taken from the front cover blurb) to be a bit darker or a bit tenser than it actually felt as I read it.
I would like to see a review of the book from someone who knows Hemingway’s work and life. I know neither and wonder if that impacts my perception of the book.
That said, I enjoyed reading this and it’s another quality publication from Weatherglass.
February 21, 2023
Ernest Hemingway spends the last decade and a half of his life writing a novel he never gets to finish. Penelope finds herself in a tangled toxic romance with her student unable to let go of him or the Hemingway novel that brought them together. Catherine, once nothing more than an idea, grows like ivy, creeping through the book as Ernest writes her and she tries desperately to defy him.
I picked this book up by chance. The orange of the spine and italic ‘Eden’ catching my eye just a few weeks ago on a random shelf in a waterstones. It was an accident. Flipping to the description and seeing ‘Hemingway’ instantly drew me in - a man who has held my heart hostage for many years. My companion joking about my uncanny ability to pick up the only novel about Hemingway in a whole bookstore of choices.
I think it might’ve been fate. I can’t stop thinking about this book, these characters and their interconnected stories. How Ernest lives out the last fifteen years of his life trying to perfect this imperfect story, with Penelope reading that exact novel decades later and it leading her into a treacherous love affair and Catherine the bridge that connects everything, trying to break free from Hemingway and his twisted mind.
It’s such a wonderfully crafted story, written with passion and deep understanding. Overall cultivates a sense of life stopping, a million moments in time and space held together by the spine of a well worn, once lost and incomplete novel.
November 25, 2023
3.5/5
I had never really delved into a novel like this before - that is it say, general fiction - but I was pleasantly surprised by how compelling this book was. The story follows three seemingly separate plot lines with three main characters, however they are all linked through their connection to Ernst Hemingway; as a university literature professor, a character in a future Hemingway novel, and finally, Hemingway himself. Although the Hemingway chapters were my least favourite of the three POVs, all three were engaging, and left me wanting to discover where these three protagonists ended up.
Final thoughts: This novel was a pleasant exploration outside of what I usually tend to read, discussing themes of gender expression and sexuality, “unethical” relationship dynamics, dissatisfaction with life, and self-discovery. I’m unlikely to re-read it, but I would recommend it to other people who are looking to read something different that isn’t too far out of the ballpark.
I had never really delved into a novel like this before - that is it say, general fiction - but I was pleasantly surprised by how compelling this book was. The story follows three seemingly separate plot lines with three main characters, however they are all linked through their connection to Ernst Hemingway; as a university literature professor, a character in a future Hemingway novel, and finally, Hemingway himself. Although the Hemingway chapters were my least favourite of the three POVs, all three were engaging, and left me wanting to discover where these three protagonists ended up.
Final thoughts: This novel was a pleasant exploration outside of what I usually tend to read, discussing themes of gender expression and sexuality, “unethical” relationship dynamics, dissatisfaction with life, and self-discovery. I’m unlikely to re-read it, but I would recommend it to other people who are looking to read something different that isn’t too far out of the ballpark.
November 3, 2022
Very interesting book, with several stories intertwined, that of Hemingway, as well as a character in one of his novels, and an episode (an affair with a student) in the life of a 40 year old English literature professor at a university. The Garden of Eden by Hemingway is the thread that holds it all together. It’s a bit long at times but a good book nonetheless.
February 7, 2023
As someone who doesn't care about Hemingway or literary fiction, I absolutely devoured this novel. The writing was easy to read and yet felt intricately constructed, and although I felt like it could've gone harder on the infidelity and ramped up the tension further, I had a really good time throughout
July 25, 2024
this book is conceptually ambitious, which i respect, but unfortunately i found the writing to be heavyhanded and at times lazy regarding plot and character development — a shame given its critical themes
November 29, 2025
2.5 stars
The Hemingway chapters were pretty dull, the rest was a lot more intriguing but the whole thing felt a bit disjointed overall. Would have loved to see more parallels between the sections to make it more cohesive.
The Hemingway chapters were pretty dull, the rest was a lot more intriguing but the whole thing felt a bit disjointed overall. Would have loved to see more parallels between the sections to make it more cohesive.
January 26, 2023
I did not like this book that much. Very wordy and took forever to get to plot points. Read a couple of chapters and then returned to the library.
July 3, 2023
Couldn't put it down. Stood out to me from the second I saw it in Waterstones.
Probably better to have read Hemingway's "Garden of Eden" before this, but it's now my next TBR.
Probably better to have read Hemingway's "Garden of Eden" before this, but it's now my next TBR.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews