The Farther Shore

Advance Reader Copy

Genres

Based on a True Story, Two Timelines, Literary Fiction, Historical, Novels, and Debut

Trigger Warnings

Violence, Profanity, Suicide, and Sex

Type of Ending

Series

Not part of a series

Author Prefers A Review On

Goodreads

Reader Spots Remaining

Number of days to read

Publication Date

Oct 20, 2026

Page Length

320 pages

Available Formats

ePub and PDF

The Farther Shore

Advance Reader Copy

Blurb

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, turn of the 20th century. 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 disappears into a remote African forest—leaving behind his newborn 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 the university’s most powerful faculty are mining his father's research to bolster theories of racial hierarchy. Accompanied by a mysterious Jewish graduate student whose fate has become entangled with his own, Charles must journey to South Africa to confront his father, heal his fractured past, and stop a sinister plot 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—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.

What people are saying...

"Akin to Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone… deeply moving and unforgettable."

- JANET BENTON, Author of Lilli de Jong

"Astonishing... as intellectually daring as it is lushly immersive. "

- JAMIE FORD, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Details

Genres

Based on a True Story, Two Timelines, Literary Fiction, Historical, Novels, and Debut

Trigger Warnings

Violence, Profanity, Suicide, and Sex

Type of Ending

Series

Not part of a series

Author Prefers A Review On

Goodreads

Reader Spots Remaining

Number of days to read

Publication Date

Oct 20, 2026

Page Length

320 pages

Available Formats

ePub and PDF

Author

Seth Fleisher is an American author whose work has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Pearl, the Journal of Anthropological Research, and elsewhere. Based in Berkeley, California, he has worked with the World Bank Group and other NGOs in South Africa, India, and more than 40 other countries, and co-founded a U.S.-based democracy initiative to counter the rising tide of authoritarianism. A former Fulbright scholar in Sri Lanka, Seth did Ph.D. work at Harvard in Buddhist social history, a fellowship at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions, and a B.A. in literature at Swarthmore, where he and his wife first met in a Chaucer seminar. THE FARTHER SHORE is his first novel.

Publisher

Green City Books