I was nearing the end of a draft for EDEN UNDONE when I learned that the legendary Ron Howard was directing a movie on the very same subject. Titled EDEN, Howard’s movie—starring Sydney Sweeney as Margret Wittmer, Jude Law as Friedrich Ritter, and Ana de Armas as the Baroness—will premiere at the Venice Film Festival in early September. Read the true story in EDEN UNDONE before seeing EDEN! Invite me to join your book club discussion, and maybe we can all cosplay as the Baroness…
Description
EDEN UNDONE
A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II
At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures.
As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian Baroness with two adoring paramours—were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The Baroness, wielding a riding crop and pearl-handled revolver, staged physical fights between her two lovers and unabashedly seduced American tourists.
The conclusion was deadly: with two exiles missing and two others dead, the survivors hurled
accusations of murder.
Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia—and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.
Hear why I've been obsessed with this stranger-than-fiction story of sex, murder, and mystery for thirteen years.
Early Praise
Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of The Wide Wide Sea
“In describing Abbott Kahler’s wickedly gothic tale, one is tempted to reach for handy literary or cinematic references. There’s a dash of Conrad. A bit of Hitchcock. Notes of Melville, Darwin, and Robinson Crusoe—and certainly more than a whiff of Lord of the Flies. But really, Eden Undone is completely its own thing. Bizarre, mesmerizing, and compellingly tragic, Kahler’s fine book confronts an essential truth about those who ditch civilization: Try as we might, humans cannot elude the tyranny of our own nature.”
Kate Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The Radium Girls and The Woman They Could Not Silence
“One of my favourite writers has knocked it out of the park yet again. In Eden Undone, Abbott Kahler has created a book as fantastic as the true story she weaves. With taut prose and sublime storytelling, she crafts an atmospheric page-turner, ominous and thought-provoking, with the best last line I’ve read in decades.”
Susannah Cahalan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire and The Great Pretender
“Absolutely riveting from start to the final twist of the knife, Eden Undone is a thrill ride of historical reportage. Abbott Kahler has woven an impossibly rich tapestry: an exotic locale, a cast of unforgettable characters, and a deeply haunting murder mystery. This is Kahler’s most captivating book yet and will cement her place as a master of narrative nonfiction.”
Michael Finkel, New York Times bestselling author of The Art Thief and The Stranger in the Woods
“It unnerves and beguiles in ways reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks—but it’s a true original.”
Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author of The Library Book
"A wild ride through an extraordinary true story, Eden Undone is addictive and astonishing. It combines a forgotten piece of history with the urgency of a murder mystery in the most unlikely setting. It will captivate you."
Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
“Abbott Kahler is a master of nonfiction suspense, with a touch of the macabre. Eden Undone reads like a dark and twisted Gilligan’s Island - half wasteland and half paradise, haunted by utopian delusions, mysterious deaths, and madness.”
Sarah Weinman, award-winning author of The Real Lolita and Scoundrel
“We all long for utopias to escape into, but as Abbott Kahler brilliantly demonstrates in the sumptuous storytelling feat that is her latest nonfiction book, Eden Undone, there simply is no escaping the hell that is other people. I was wowed by her research, her depiction of the tropical magic of the Galápagos Islands, her empathy for such a vivid array of characters—some of whom behave very badly—and for the larger point that paradises can be squandered by human venality.”
Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can’t Sleep
“Eden Undone is a mind-blowing tale of adventure, obsession, and hubris, with more twists—and more eccentric characters—than an Agatha Christie mystery. (The gun-toting, sex-crazed Baroness is surely one of the more spectacular villains in true-crime history.) In Abbott Kahler’s ever-brilliant hands, truth is always stranger than fiction.”
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