GR: And all three of the books in To Paradise take place in New York City but a century apart. And how shame colors our lives and informs our decisions, not only as individuals but as nations and as cultures. I also think one of the themes that runs through all of them, though, is shame.

A Little Life was very divorced from time, and in this book, the worlds of the novel are divorced from actual history.

I would say what this has in common with A Little Life is there's a certain, sort of, a historicism. To some degree, it had nothing to do with the political climate, and to some degree, it did. As I started writing it, various events in real time began colliding in interesting ways with the imagined worlds of the book, but it didn't fundamentally change what I was writing about. In terms of actually laying fingertips to keyboards, that really began in March of 2018. This idea of America as a land that was open to all was perhaps flawed in its conception from the very beginning. had we been, in a way, mis-billing America all along? Really, what a paradise does is keep people out, not allow them in.

Hanya Yanagihara: I started thinking about the idea of paradise after the Muslim ban in early 2017, and this idea, specifically, of America as a paradise. Goodreads: Can you tell me a little bit about how you got the idea for this book? And also, how is it similar or different from the other two novels that you published? She talked to Goodreads contributor April Umminger about the pandemic, publishing, and writing To Paradise. With these ambitious stories, Yanagihara flips American history on its head in examining the past, present, and future, both real and imagined. And Yanagihara paints a dystopian portrait of America and New York City in 2093, a city beset with plagues and a totalitarian regime, seemingly anything but paradise. The AIDS epidemic is running rampant when Hawaiian paralegal David Bingham falls for an older senior partner in 1993. The book follows wealthy Washington-Square resident David Bingham, who weighs love against the finer things in a land of plenty.īooks two and three present characters with the same names as those in book one, who navigate New York City, love, and life in 19, respectively.

Throughout, Yanagihara tackles notions of shame, class, inequity, illness, consequence, and America itself.īook one takes place in an idealized America in 1893, where there are “free states” and “the colonies.” New York City is one of the free, where same-sex couples can marry, but that doesn’t make love any easier. In To Paradise, the highly acclaimed author of A Little Life and The People in the Trees, tells three distinct stories that take place in New York City, each told 100 years apart. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars Hanya Yanagihara’s latest novel is actually three tales of New York.

Hanya to paradise