TO PARADISE
From the 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.
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 are joined in an enthralling and 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.
To Paradise is a fin de siecle 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.
About the Author
Following her graduation from Smith College in 1995, Yanagihara moved to New York and worked for several years as a publicist. She wrote and was an editor for Condé Nast Traveler.
Her first novel, The People in the Trees, partly based on the real-life case of the virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, was praised as one of the best novels of 2013.
Yanagihara's A Little Life was published in March 2015 and received widespread critical acclaim. The book was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for fiction,[10] and won the 2015 Kirkus Prize for fiction. Yanagihara was also selected as a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction. A Little Life defied the expectations of its editor, of Yanagihara's agent, and of the author herself, that it would not sell well. Yanagihara described writing the book at its best as "glorious as surfing; it felt like being carried aloft on something I couldn't conjure but was lucky enough to have caught, if for just a moment. At its worst, I felt I was somehow losing my ownership over the book. It felt, oddly, like being one of those people who adopt a tiger or lion when the cat's a baby and cuddly and manageable, and then watch in dismay and awe when it turns on them as an adult".
In 2015, she left Condé Nast to become a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. She has said that after she published the bestselling novel A Little Life, people in the publishing industry were baffled by her decision to take a job at T. Describing the publishing world as "a provincial community, more or less as snobby as the fashion industry", she said, "I'd get these underhanded comments like, 'oh, I never knew there were words [in T Magazine] worth reading'". Of working as an editor while writing fiction on the side, she says, "I've never done it any other way". In 2017, she became the editor-in-chief of T.
Yanagihara's third novel, To Paradise, was published in January 2022.
Photo by Wirasathya Darmaja