Edge of Eden

by Helen Benedict

In 1960, when her husband, Rupert, a British diplomat, is posted to the remote Seychelle Islands in the Indian Ocean, Penelope is less than thrilled. But she never imagined the danger that awaited her family there. Her sun-kissed children run barefoot on the beach and become enraptured by the ancient magic, or grigri , in the tropical colonial outpost. Rupert, meanwhile, falls under the spell of a local beauty who won’t stop until she gets what she wants.

Desperate to save her marriage, Penelope turns to black magic, exposing her family to the island’s sinister underbelly. Ultimately, Penny and her family suffer unimaginable casualties, rendering their lives profoundly and forever changed. Helen Benedict’s acerbic wit and lush descriptions serve up a page-turner brimming with jealousy, sex, and witchcraft in a darkly exotic Eden.

Genres: Africa, Fiction, Seychelles, Mystery, Magic, Cultural, Contemporary

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Helen Benedict is an award-winning novelist and nonfiction writer, and a professor of journalism at Columbia University. Her latest novel, The Good Deed, is due out in April, 2024, and addresses refugees, the problem with white saviors, and the relations between mothers and daughters.

The Good Deed draws on much of the material Benedict explored in her recent nonfiction book, Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece (Footnote Press) which was released in the UK in June 2022 and in the US in October, 2022.

Kirkus Review called it, "A powerful collection of stories from refugees stuck in asylum limbo in Greece… Gut-wrenching and necessary, this book sharply depicts an escalating humanitarian crisis that shows few signs of slowing down…An important, deeply felt look at lives in constant peril."

Benedict's seventh and latest novel, Wolf Season (Bellevue Literary Press) in October, 2017.

The novel tells the story of how, after a hurricane devastates a small town in upstate New York, the lives of three women and their young children are irrevocably changed. Rin, an Iraq War veteran, tries to protect her daughter and the three wolves under her care. Naema, a widowed doctor who fled Iraq with her wounded son, faces life-threatening injuries and confusion about her feelings for Louis, a veteran and widower harboring his own secrets and guilt. Beth, who is raising a troubled son, waits out her marine husband’s deployment in Afghanistan, equally afraid of him coming home and of him never returning at all. As they struggle to maintain their humanity and find hope, their war-torn lives collide in a way that will affect their entire community.

“No one writes with more authority or cool-eyed compassion about the experience of women in war both on and off the battlefield than Helen Benedict. In Wolf Season, she shows us the complicated ways in which the lives of those who serve and those who don't intertwine and how—regardless of whether you are a soldier, the family of a soldier, or a refugee—the war follows you and your children for generations. Wolf Season is more than a novel for our times; it should be required reading.”
—ELISSA SCHAPPELL, author of Use Me and Blueprints for Building Better Girls

“Fierce and vivid and full of hope, this story of trauma and resilience, of love and family, of mutual aid and solidarity in the aftermath of a brutal war is nothing short of magic. Helen Benedict is the voice of an American conscience that has all too often been silenced. To read these pages is to be transported to a world beyond hype and propaganda to see the human cost of war up close. This is not a novel that allows you to walk away unchanged.”
—CARA HOFFMAN, author of Be Safe I Love You and Running

Benedict's previous novel, Sand Queen, was published by Soho Press in August, 2011. The novel tells the story of a young female soldier and an Iraqi woman caught up in the Iraq War.

“Benedict’s writing is impressive, passionate, and visceral. . . . Reading this book is the best literary path to understanding the particular challenges of being female in the military during warfare.” —Publishers Weekly “Best Contemporary War Novel” citation

Publisher’s Weekly also called Sand Queen “a thrilling and thoughtful new novel.” Booklist said, “Funny, shocking, painful, and, at times, deeply disturbing, Sand Queen takes readers beyond the news and onto the battlefield."

Benedict is also the author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving Iraq (2009/10), and a play, The Lonely Soldier Monologues, which has been performed all over the US, and in France and the UK. In 2011, The Lonely Soldier inspired a class action suit against the Pentagon on behalf of military women and men who have been sexually assaulted while serving.

Her previous novels include The Edge of Eden, The Sailor’s Wife and Bad Angel.

Benedict’s books and articles have won the 2010 Exceptional Merit in

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

A perfectly engaging story, but not, as promised by my local bookseller, well-written, Woolfian prose. Okay, admittedly, promising that I'll like a book because it's like Woolf sets the bar pretty high for me, and so maybe I went into it with unfair expectations, but I actually found this book to be surprisingly poorly written. I kept feeling like I could see the machinations of Benedict's prose, as she worked extra hard to make sure all the plot pieces fit together: The people tasked to watch the children of the newly arrived Brits to the island of Seychelles are remarkably inept, allowing the children to continually wander off in order to create some kind of plot-advancing havoc. We continually get parenthetical qualifiers explaining the drama such as "(What Joelle didn't notice was...)" and all kinds of "meanwhile"s that end up feeling heavy-handedly "Hey, look at how all these pieces fit together!" And finally, the book is full of your standard stereotypes: The frigid and uptight British woman on an island of exotic, alluring African-Indian women, the spunky, liberated American woman who winks when being introduced to the protagonist (Who actually winks in a situation like this except when an author has them do it in order to show something about their character!?), the native servant who knows far more than she lets on, etc. etc. But 2.5 stars because some of the descriptions of the natural landscape, food, and bugs captured me, and I somehow became interested in the characters and what would happen to them. However, though he's done well by me two other times, I might not take another suggestion from my bookseller, at least for a while.

[Tinea · Rating 3 out of 5]

As they say on /r/AITA/ : Everyone Sucks Here. Spoiled and myopic white colonists wrecked from untreated inter-generational war trauma, sexist men and dry sex, drama-obsessed Seychelloises with irresistible bodies and little sense of consequences. Did the author suck too? I don't know, she is poking fun at these tropes but also writing them. We get to be sympathetic to the Brits because we learn roots of their terrible behavior. While there's a white American Anthropologist who comes onto the scene to share a little of the still recent history of enslavement in the family story of migration for most Seychellois, we don't hear it from the Seychellois characters and they don't have flashbacks that arrive in time to justify cruel and stupid deeds.

As a story, this is an read easy. Beautiful descriptions of nature-- it's worth reading with Google image search at hand. Juicy, gossipy characters you can enjoy hating or rooting for.

The book focuses on Seychellois religious beliefs (magic) that remarkably resemble (what I know of) Haitian voodoo, which is derived from some West African religious practices... but Seychelles is clear across the continent, in the ocean between Madagascar and India. Is there a link and if so, through what route, what era?

Left me curious.

[Silvia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It's the best one I read based in the Seychelles: such a good story, brilliant characters, various different plots and themes, and - most surprising of all - a serious account of the less obvious consequences of the Second World War in the younger British generation. Great read, I'd recommend it to anyone who'd like to know more about the islands, is interested in British colonialism, or simply an entertaining family story.

[Kristin]

Sadly, because I didn't think this book was absolutely great, the review has been shelved and likely won't be published. So, here it is:

Helen Benedict’s paradisial edge is as rugged and complex as the borders of her characters’ native islands. The most apparent dark side of eden is the negative affects of colonialism on both the colonized and the colonizers. But Benedict’s fiction also does not hide from the very real contrasting sides to love—jealosy, hate, regret—and the depth of the affects of war. What happened to Benedict’s characters during World War II continues to plot their fates twenty years later.

In 1960 Rupert and Penelope and their young daughters, Zara and Chloe, move from England to Seychelles for Rupert’s new job reporting to the British government on the islands’ current and projected economy. Drama, and some humor, ensue as the Weston family meets their new neighbors—those descended from French slaveholders and African and Indian slaves, philandering British men with drunk wives, and one American couple who offers some example of gender equality—and faces both new demons and those old ones with which each Weston arrives.

Zara is a skillfully drawn character. Any writer could assign gradeschool Zara a favorite toy, maybe give her a particular speech pattern—in other words, write an older version of toddler Chloe and have a satisfactory pair of sisters. Instead, Benedict goes to places like childhood violence, as when Zara experiments with elaborate ways to torture and kill ants in her new island home, and childhood sexuality, as when on the ocean liner Zara would take Chloe “between the lifeboats where no could see and make her pull down her knickers and bend over to be spanked […:] Zara would feel high and strong, guilty and dirty all at once. Excited between the legs, ashamed between the ears. The cure was to go swimming” (xii). Benedict also describes just as well the pure beauty children experience—readers will find themselves holding their own breath as Zara snorkles the Indian Ocean, a mermaid queen assigning each school of unique and colorful fish she comes upon as members of her court.

Unfortunately, the other characters aren’t quite as perfectly made, so that sometimes the omniscient point of view is frustrating, the individual decisions made are confusing, and the resolutions are unsatisfactory. Fortunately, this happens in the last third of the book, so while the conclusion may leave readers unhappily wanting, they will have started a fascinating story, one that will hopefully encourage further reading—and further writing.

(November 2009)
Kristin Thiel

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping the book would be more about Seychelles people and less about pathological British colonial family crap. The story is okay I guess. Surveying the other reviews, I sense that readers are missing the comedy of the gri-gri merry-go-round. Jolly good farce with the wife, husband's lover and even the little Brit daughter casting spells in slapstick fashion. Glad to see that the author pulls her childhood memories of Seychelles into her novel.

[Sandie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story is a 1960’s marriage unravelling in a tropical location- but the background history of the Seychelles and the impact of the dissolution of family on the two young daughters was worth the read.

[Dianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a wonderful novel and I am somewhat baffled by the low ratings and few reviews. Showing the beauty of the Seychelles in 1960, along with the highs and the lows of one British diplomat's family, this was interesting and suspenseful. A book that has sadly been overlooked.

[Rhonda Hankins]

I enjoyed this novel set in The Seychelles. A lot of the story is predictable fluff, but the author weaves in enough local "grigri," black magic, and local superstitions to make it interesting.

[Lindalee · Rating 4 out of 5]

An English family moves to a poor tropical island and each member is affected in a different way by its spell. Penelope (the mother) is deeply depressed from being dragged there without being consulted, Rupert (the father) falls for a local beauty and leaves his family, and the children are left in the care of a nanny. The older girl begins dabbling in the dark arts to bring her family back together and the consequences are life-threatening. Things go from bad to worse, mostly from really bad decisions made by adults, but also by the efforts of the children to cope. If you're looking for a happy ending, you might want to skip this book. However, I could not put it down, and I loved the description of the local culture and the English trying to exist within it.

[Paula Hebert · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is a really interesting take on the fish out of water theme. we watch a very unlikable english family, including their two very young daughters, disintegrate after being relocated by the home office to an equatorial island between madagascar and india. combined with voodoo, racial stigma, and an excellent grasp of the native culture, it is really good story, and keeps your interest throughout.

[Donna · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel follows the break-up of a marriage, which occurs after a family relocation from England to the Seychelles. Unfortunately the location provides the only real excitement of the novel. Whilst some of the supporting characters are of some interest, the main characters are two-dimensional. As this is a character-driven story, the failing of these central characters leads to the failure of the novel as a whole. Disappointing, as the novelist describes the locale wonderfully!

[Kristin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book more. The setting was exotic and the plot got into a little of the island culture. I think the story would have been more engaging with a few less characters and more editing. As it was, the arc of the story was rather flat and predictable. It didn't help that I listened to this book read by a narrator who, while creative in her voices, came across as rather stuck up during the whole of her reading.

[Allyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this book a true page-turner and was not at all sure how it would end. Zara and Marguerite were very well developed characters and the author had fine descriptive skills. I felt I was right there living the story. The date of 1960 seemed incongrous but there were many such aspects that could have been better, but I quite enjoyed it.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked this book much better than the two stars would suggest. Its is a real page turner and kept me in suspense. I absorbed the feel of the location, and ms Benedict was excellent with putiing you in the place of an ex-patriot in an exotic locale. The characters were not well developed and the plot line was disjointed. I would call this a great "pass the time read."

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

A family can't seem to stop itself from making the mistakes of their parents, no matter how often they swear not to. Displace the family in a tropical climate - throw in some very exotic natives, and you've got this book. Not bad, but nothing felt resolved at the end.

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was only ok. It was a fairly interesting story, but it had way too much sexual content for my taste.

I finished it thinking... so... what? Not my favorite. Wouldn't recommend it... sorry!

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful descriptions of the Seychelles but the end of the book was unfulfilling and generally a disappointment.

[Denny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrical and insightful descriptions of the Seychelles combine with a torpid atmosphere of deceit, magic, and misunderstanding to create a marvelous read. Highly recommend.

[Linda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, I read 177 of the 301 pages in this book and decided that I just didn't want to read anymore! I wasn't really interested in the characters or the story. Very disappointing. Time to move on!!

[Janics]

It was okay.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

The atmosphere was nearly oppressive - it follows a displaced English family that is basically a train wreck in the making. I found the oldest daughter annoying as well as the husband.

[Elly Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, hard to put down.
An extraordinary book, an education for me.