Eden Undone: An Afternoon with Abbott Kahler

The Harrisburg Book Festival and Midtown Cinema are honored to welcome New York Times bestselling author Abbott Kahler to Harrisburg for a conversation and signing on her new book, Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, M**der, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II. Kahler will be in conversation with Stuart Landon.

Kahler's book follows the same little-known and true, crazier-than-fiction story as the upcoming film from Ron Howard, “Eden,” starring Sydney Sweeney, Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, and Ana de Armas. This event will open with a screening of the trailer for 'Eden.'

Doors will open at 2:00pm, and the event will begin at 2:30pm. Seating is general admission; first come, first served. Book signing to follow discussion at the Midtown Cinema.

About the Book:

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 M**der.
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.

About the Speaker:

Abbott Kahler, formerly writing as Karen Abbott, is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; The Ghosts of Eden Park (an Edgar Award finalist for Best Fact Crime), and a novel, Where You End. A native of Philadelphia, she lives in New York City and in Greenport, New York.

Event Venue

Midtown Cinema, 250 Reily Street, Harrisburg, United States