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Learn moreThe first novel of Kage Baker’s critically acclaimed, much-loved series, the Company, introduces us to a world where the future of commerce is the past. In the twenty-fourth century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life (for profit of course). It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company, Dr. Zeus, Inc. One of these is Mendoza, the botanist. She is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden. But while there, she meets Nicholas Harpole, with whom she falls in love. And that love sounds great bells of change which will echo down the centuries, and through the succeeding novels of the Company.
Breathtakingly detailed and written with great aplomb, In the Garden of Iden is a contemporary classic of the science fiction genre.
Kage Baker (1952–2010) was an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Centre and taught Elizabethan English as a second language.
Janan Raouf, although born in the United States, grew up in Japan, Switzerland, and Holland before returning to attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has lived and worked as an actress on stage, film, and television on both coasts. Janan currently resides in Los Angeles.
Reviews
“Clever…Baker draws a colorful portrait of life in sixteenth-century England. Into this she inserts an unusual mix of mortals, all-too-fallible immortals, and a generous dollop of antic wit.”
“The prose is compulsively readable—it has the breezy feel of someone casually telling us a story, a feeling I associate with, say, Heinlein at his best…It’s easily on a level with Le Guin’s or Resnick’s first novels.”
“So, how do you classify a seriously philosophical time-travel story of a young cyborg’s first love amid religious conflict? As a good read.”
“Baker’s characterizations are robust and detailed, as is her development of the historical setting…[Listeners] will recognize in Baker a fantasist of considerable promise.”
“Janan Raouf keeps the narration light and maintains hopefulness in the character of Mendoza, which offsets some of the darkness of the times. With a steady and even pace Raouf keeps the story moving.”
“Baker’s witty debut novel is a pip. Full of exquisite descriptions of sixteenth-century England and the Spanish Inquisition, this is a bittersweet tale of a young woman’s first love…Highly recommended.”
“A highly impressive and thoroughly engrossing debut.”
“Set both in the twenty-fourth and sixteenth centuries, In the Garden of Iden (the first of Kage Baker’s The Company novels) is a unique historical science fiction romance…It was a lovely performance…I do hope that Blackstone Audio will be producing more of Kage Baker’s The Company novels."
“The debut of a major talent. Kage Baker is a fresh, audacious, ambitious new voice, wry, jazzy, irreverent, sharp as a razor, full of daring, dash, and élan, sometimes surprisingly lyrical. She is also one hell of a storyteller. If you’re reading something by Kage Baker, fasten your seat belt—you’re in for a wild ride.”
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