"The confounding, brilliant, intricate, beautiful, horrific To Paradise is - it this string of adjectives did not sufficiently convey it - an extraordinariy book." - Vogue
"Hanya Yanagihara's To Paradise is as good as War and Peace." - Edmund White
IN AN ALTERNATE VERSION OF 1893 AMERICA, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist's damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him - and solve the mystery of her husband's disappearances. These three sections comprise an ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhoot; the dangerous rightcousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaires; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can't exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americans, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness. To Paradise is a fin de siècle novel of marvelous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara's understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love - partners, lovers, children, family, and even our fellow citizens - and the pain that ensues when we cannot.
"A tale of manners, family, migration, and politicals dystopia that reads like Edith Wharton meets Jonathan Franzen meets Moshin Hamid meets George Orwell." Vanity Fair
Cover design and spine illustrations by Na Kim Cover painting: lokepa, Hawaiian Fisher Boy, oil on canvas, by Hubert Vos, 1898. History and Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo
