#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.
