Part memoir, part adventure story, part intellectual voyage, The Other Side of Eden begins in the High Arctic of the 1970s. This was where Hugh Brody first lived with hunting peoples and where, as he explains, he first encountered a way of being that would transform how he saw the world. In this marvellous new book, Brody’s travels take him through exquisite landscapes of ice and snow with companions who know the land as a part of themselves. He also travels through time and space as he explores the divide between hunters and farmers that lies at the core of human history.

Shaped with a compelling mix of order and intuition, The Other Side of Eden draws on the author’s personal experience, on the words of the hunter-gatherers he comes to know and on the work of linguists, anthropologists and historians. Why did the farmer triumph over the hunter-gatherer? He seeks and finds the answer in a variety of places, among them the book of Genesis, the great Biblical creation myth at the centre of the agriculturalist view of the world.

Finally, Brody poses questions about the mind itself, arriving at a compelling and profoundly hopeful conclusion. Something exists, he suggests, that is neither heaven nor hell, neither modern nor ancient, neither civilized nor primitive: a place within each of us where we can be beyond the dichotomies and ultimately more fully ourselves.

Hugh Brody is a writer and filmmaker. He is the author of Indians on Skid Row, Inishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland, The People's Land, Living Arctic and, with Michael Ignatieff, of 1919.

Hugh Brody's profile page