Another Kind of Eden

James Lee Burke

Aug 2021 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

New York Times bestselling author James Lee Burke brings readers a captivating tale of justice, love, brutality, and mysticism set in the turbulent 1960s.

The American West in the early 1960s appears to be a pastoral paradise: golden wheat fields, mist-filled canyons, frolicking animals. Aspiring novelist Aaron Holland Broussard has observed it from the open door of a boxcar, riding the rails for both inspiration and odd jobs.

Jumping off in Denver, he finds work on a farm and meets Joanne McDuffy, an articulate and fierce college student and gifted painter. Their soul connection is immediate, but their romance is complicated by Joanne’s involvement with a shady professor who is mixed up with a drug-addled cult. When a sinister businessman and his son who wield their influence through vicious cruelty set their sights on Aaron, drawing him into an investigation of grotesque murders, it is clear that this idyllic landscape harbors tremendous power—and evil. Followed by a mysterious shrouded figure who might not be human, Aaron will have to face down all these foes to save the life of the woman he loves and his own.

The latest installment in James Lee Burke’s masterful Holland family saga, Another Kind of Eden is both riveting and one of Burke’s most ambitious works to date. It dismantles the myths of both the twentieth-century American West and the peace-and-love decade, excavating the beauty and idealism of the era to show the menace and chaos that lay simmering just beneath the surface.

Ratings and reviews

I received a free electronic copy of this book, an ARC, from Netgalley, James Lee Burke, and the publisher Simon & Schuster. I have read Another Kind of Eden of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. I love everything James Lee Burke blesses us with. And though I can't wait to read his southern novels, His Holland Family sagas are all exceptional. This book is more true-to-life than anything else I have read about this period of time in the Southwest. It is obviously based on personal experience, and from the heart. Taking place in the early 1960s, we are in southern Colorado, a small town called Trinidad 21 miles north of Raton, New Mexico. Trinidad was a mining town back in the early 20th century, and with a population now of about 8,000 and still dwindling in 2021, it continues to be economically dependent on tourism and truck gardens, still small, down-home, insular, and isolated. This is pretty much a template of small western towns, then and now. This is a first-person tale told by Aaron Holland Broussard, a young man of 26, trained as an English teacher but working his way across the west by hopping trains and making a living as a farmworker while he waits for a publisher to want his first novel. The western lifestyle of the early 1960s is portrayed as it probably was. I was 12 or 13 in southern New Mexico and didn't see much off of the farm but from what I remember the times were rather bleak. Money was tight - is always tight in farm country - and immigrants and hippies were often traveling through on their way to anywhere else. Veterans of WWII and Korea were also traveling through our west, looking for something. They would find a place to land, but the road would call them before long, and they would be on their way to somewhere else. Aaron lets us see it through his eyes, and it is so sad it might bring you to tears, but you will have a much better understanding of both that time frame in America and the woes of veterans of our country's 20th-century wars. Another Kind of Eden is a book I would like everyone I know to read. It is a wake-up call for all of us to take to heart.

About the author

James Lee Burke is a New York Times bestselling author, two-time winner of the Edgar Award, and the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction. He has authored forty novels and two short story collections. He lives in Missoula, Montana.