#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. A BEST
BOOK OF THE YEAR: VOGUE • ESQUIRE • NPR • GOODREADS 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.
