To Paradise: A Novel
- ISBN-10
- 0385547943
- ISBN-13
- 9780385547949
- Category
- Fiction
- Pages
- 717
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2022-01-11
- Publisher
- Doubleday
- Author
- Hanya Yanagihara
Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the award-winning, best-selling author of the classic A Little Life—a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia. 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, friends, family, and even our fellow citizens—and the pain that ensues when we cannot. 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 nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; 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 Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.
Get the book
Similar books
-
A Little Life
By Hanya YanagiharaNATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search ...
-
A Portal to Paradise
By Alden C. HayesEven if most had never personally worried about Indian attacks, they had known people who had. Over the years, Hayes heard the handed-down stories about the area's early days of Anglo settlement.
-
Rushing to Paradise: A Novel
By J. G. BallardLed by a charismatic and slightly unhinged woman, a group of environmentalists win control over a small atoll in the Pacific and sets up a utopian community.
-
Paradise
By Toni Morrison“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison's Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma.
-
Thank You, Mr. Nixon: Stories
By Gish JenWith their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these eleven linked stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history, capturing an extraordinary era in an extraordinary way.
-
Return to Paradise: Stories
By James A. MichenerAs you watch this riotous end of Christmas night there comes a final catch at your heart, for there in the bright ... When his first wife died John came upon the English pirate Tapscott, a hell-raising renegade who had abducted a wife ...
-
In Paradise: A Novel
By Peter MatthiessenPeter Matthiessen was a literary legend, the author of more than thirty acclaimed books. In this, his final novel, he confronts the legacy of evil, and our unquenchable desire to wrest good from it.
-
This Is Paradise: Stories
By Kristiana KahakauwilaExploring the deep tensions between local and tourist, tradition and expectation, façade and authentic self, This Is Paradise provides an unforgettable portrait of life as it’s truly being lived on Maui, Oahu, Kaua'i and the Big Island.
-
Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work
By André GorzWe are moving into a world where a power elite allocates jobs: where commodities buy consumers: where socialist as well as capitalist dogma is an obstacle to comprehension.In this book,...
-
Ghost to Paradise
By D. N. KrisA drug deal gone wrong.