The Farther Shore
The Farther Shore is a preorder and will not be available for playback until 10/20/2026.
“An astonishing reimagining of the life of Eugene Marais, The Farther Shore is as intellectually daring as it is lushly immersive. Seth Fleisher renders history with a decadent richness—each page steeped in atmosphere, obsession, and unease—while excavating the dangerous fictions of race and the seductive machinery of rising fascism. What emerges is not just a portrait of a man, but a mirror held up to our own moment: a world still grappling with identity as both inheritance and invention.”
Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author
The Farther Shore is a sweeping novel about fathers and sons, memory and race, and the dangerous fictions that shape us-inspired by the true story of Eugene Marais, one of history's most extraordinary and forgotten minds.
Southern Africa, 1890s. Eugene Marais is a brilliant naturalist and iconoclastic journalist whose evolving theories about memory, addiction, and the hive mind are decades ahead of their time. But when tragedy strikes, he abandons his newborn son and disappears into a remote South African forest-leaving behind his child and his conscience, and embarking on research that will haunt both their lives.
Thirty years later, his son Charles-now a professor of ancient Buddhist history at Harvard-discovers that his father's work has been weaponized. University faculty are mining Eugene's research to bolster theories of racial hierarchy, and their ambitions are growing darker by the day. Accompanied by a mysterious Jewish graduate student whose fate is becoming entangled with his own, Charles will make an epic journey across continents to heal his fractured past and stop a sinister plot quietly taking root at the world's most prestigious institution.
Set across two interlocking timelines-from the British concentration camps of the Boer War to the rising shadow of the Third Reich and WWII-The Farther Shore is a heart-breaking, exhilarating novel about memory, love, and identity, and about the vast distances we'll travel to find our way home.