"Brilliant . . . Thomas’s gorgeously constructed story explores difficulties of love, as Ro, a refreshingly complex protagonist, weighs their idyllic bliss with Liam against their desire to help those in need. This luminous novel is impossible to forget." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"In their debut novel, Thomas demonstrates thrilling control of their craft, delivering a story as thoughtfully constructed as it is exhilarating to read. Ro and Liam are as real and compelling as characters come, their relationship providing the tangible fabric of the novel. There is true symbiosis here between form and content . . . Radically inventive, compassionate, and perspicacious. Compulsively page-turning." —Kirkus (starred review)

"In a genre-defying debut novel, Thomas has crafted a stunning depiction of what finding joy can look like in a world that means to do you harm . . . Led by autistic and genderqueer Ro, the storytelling is at once deeply rooting and starry-eyed. Much like the serial at its heart, Mad Eden has collaged fantasy, science, the political, and the personal into a story unlike any other." —Booklist

"Mad Eden is unlike anything I’ve read—a novel of staggering invention and fearless intimacy. Morgan Thomas bends time, myth, and science into a story that is dazzling and devastating, tender and unflinching. It’s a book about queer and autistic survival, about care and precarity, about joy insisting on itself in the face of collapse. Sentence by sentence, Mad Eden remakes the world as it tells it. What lingers is not resolution but creation itself: the hum of a book that will not end." —Morgan Talty, author of Night of the Living Rez and Fire Exit

"Every Morgan Thomas sentence is a shocking, surprising, and devious diamond. They are one of the best prose stylists working today and a true magician of character and place. Mad Eden transported me and changed me." —Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of Housemates and Fat Swim

"Mad Eden has taken hold of me and will not let go. It's a novel about trans and neurodivergent family, about care bans and TERF psyops, but also about how texts are remixed and altered—and how our collective identity crisis is in some sense a memetic replication crisis. I can't stop thinking about this book and it's earned a place on my queer classics shelf next to Audre Lorde and Rachel Pollack, among others. Mad Eden is utterly gorgeous—with so many sentences I wanted to underline—and feels utterly essential at this moment when so many of us are feeling lost." —Charlie Jane Anders, Nebula and Hugo-winning author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster and All the Birds in the Sky

“Bold, inventive, bursting with intelligence and heart. Mad Eden illuminates the lives of queer, neurodivergent, and Southern characters seeking, against all odds, joy in an inhospitable world—while showing the costs of denying others, and oneself, such joy and radical acceptance. In Mad Eden, Morgan Thomas doesn’t shy away from showing how the personal and the political are deeply intertwined. Thomas is one of the most visionary and exciting writers in contemporary fiction today.” — Daphne Palasi Andreades, author of Brown Girls

"Morgan Thomas is brilliant. Who else could bring autism, dragons and queerness together with such boldness, joy and intelligence in the most artful sentences and scientific seriousness? The insular world of these characters emphasises the dangers of an outside that sets traps, but inside is seeking and tender and messy. An inventive and revelatory portrait of a neurodivergent mind—funny, moving, sensual, mysterious, and genius, I have never read anything like Mad Eden." —'Pemi Aguda, author of Ghostroots

"Mad Eden burrowed into my brain and made me touch the world differently. In an inhospitable time, Morgan Thomas has given us a slippery paradise—with alligators and dragons hiding in its grass, yes, but with the fruits of tenderness and love and joy in easy reach." —Katherine Packert Burke, author of All Us Saints and Still Life