#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.

To Paradise was really a mixed bag for us. On the plus side, Yanagihara handles several elements of the novel very well. The worldbuilding of an alternate vision of the continental US and Hawaii that reimagines queer rights, colonialism, and pandemics was well handled; we were very ready for Yanagihara to miss the mark in the setting she was creating, but we all felt she did a very good job thinking through the setting and creating a believable world with gay marriage in the early 20th century and dystopian bureaucracies of disease control in the future. This final section about a quarantined and deeply constrained world was the strongest part of the story and all of liked the way that Yanagihara used a neurally divergent protagonist to both see the restrictions of NYC in the aftermath of a new pandemic as well as explore dreams of escape, the theme that the novel returns to over and over again. However, there are two sections before that final chapter, and that's a lot of text to get through given that all of the protagonists are people who either can't or won't take much action or make productive decisions. In particular, the second section in Hawaii is essentially a long description of people who choose to drop out of society and it's just a lot of time reading about people doing nothing but suffering from their own inertia and depression. Yanagihara can certainly write, but even pretty writing can't really save a story in which we watch people not act in their own most basic interests for so much time. No one loved or hated the novel, but whether anyone thought it was worth reading was a question of how much endurance they had for staying with such ineffectual protagonists. If you really like Yanagihara's style, you'll probably enjoy the good parts of this book, but be ready for a long slog in the middle of this one.