Waiting for Eden: A novel
Waiting for Eden is a short, intense novel that brings us into the mind of Eden, the most wounded soldier ever--he was both injured and kept alive by the newest technologies. For three years, Eden has been holding onto life while his wife, Mary, keeps vigil in his hospital room and his friend and fellow soldier who died watches, and waits. As Eden battles fears and struggles to find order in his own mind and to communicate his wishes, his wife struggles as well--with her sense of loyalty, her exhaustion, and her guilt.
Eden's friend narrates and guides us between the past and present, bringing us to difficult questions of how past wrongs affect our present decisions, and who decides what makes a life worth living. Beautifully written and emotionally charged, this is not a light read--but it is a powerful one.
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Publisher’s Description
From the National Book Award finalist, a breathtakingly spare and shattering new novel that traces the intersection of three star-crossed lives.
Eden Malcom lies in a bed, unable to move or to speak, imprisoned in his own mind. His wife Mary spends every day on the sofa in his hospital room. He has never even met their young daughter. And he will never again see the friend and fellow soldier who didn’t make it back home–and who narrates the novel. But on Christmas, the one day Mary is not at his bedside, Eden’s re-ordered consciousness comes flickering alive. As he begins to find a way to communicate, some troubling truths about his marriage–and about his life before he went to war–come to the surface. Is Eden the same man he once was: a husband, a friend, a father-to-be? What makes a life worth living? A piercingly insightful, deeply felt meditation on loyalty and betrayal, love and fear, Waiting for Eden is a tour de force of profound humanity.
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