This was such a good book. I love historical fiction, especially when it is about eras/ situations that I previously knew nothing about and this was definitely one of those books. It was so well researched and so compelling in its narrative that not only did I love reading it but I felt that I learned too. A really enjoyable read and perfect for any fans of historical fiction. This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

A little life is my favourite book for the last 15 years and I was very much looking forward to reading To Paradise which I downloaded and jumped into on its publication day
The book did not let my expectations down in any way , it is another master piece of modern literature I was immediately grabbed and found the book un put down-able .
I loved the multiple stories over many generations in multiple parallel worlds all linked subtly and cleverly , I particularly enjoyed the very first section telling of a world set I. our past with differences in the way LBGQ relationships were seen and accepted .
The book continues with world where gay relationships were the norm or were frowned upon or penalised travelling between the past present and future between Hawaii and USA or what might have been the same country in other lives .
The characters appeared and reappeared different and similar in varying amounts , the common themes of relationships of overpowering parents and underachieving adult children were mingled with a strong sense of place both country ,city and house .
As a book written during the 2020 Covid pandemic the echos of similar episodes through the century and of a future where recurring significant pandemics are the norm made difficult reading on occasion but our familiarity with the language of quarantine and vaccine development helped in understanding the significance of the episodes discussed
I thoroughly enjoyed this book it is beautifully written filled with detailed character descriptions and with the beautiful prose style of the author . A gem of a book if I can use this description for such a weighty novel of distinction, I will be strongly recommending it

Hanya Yanagihara can do no wrong in my eyes. I did not love 'To Paradise' as much as 'A Little Life' but this book really does stand on it's own and is a wonderful read. Would recommend it to everyone!

Two months after I finished it, <i>To Paradise</i> is still with me. I would say it's one of my favourite books of the last couple of years.

It's hard to say much in a review without revealing some of the fantastic surprises in the novel, not just in plot, but its structure and themes. I myself am glad that I didn't know too much in advance of reading -- and I wouldn't want to take that thrill away from all the friends I really do recommend this to.

It's ambitious, clever, moving and above all, hopeful. It's absolutely a page-turner, but even so, I spent about a month savouring it.

Once again Hanya Yanagihara has utterly shattered me. Her writing is so beautifully emotive and captures our flaws with such insight. Even if Utopian America, we are fallible. She sees so clearly into the soul and evokes this so naturally on the page. Unforgettable.

After being punched in the gut, the heart and the soul with A Little Life, I wasn’t sure this massive tome could hold a candle to it.

It had far too many characters - with the same names! - and I was losing track of who was who and who fit where in this family tree. It was also focussed on future pandemics & quarantines & viruses - enough - which may result in losing readers here as may be too soon to consider a more devastating outcome than what we have just gone through.

The writing is extraordinary but it couldn’t make up for this feeling of where am I? What year is it? Who are the current characters?

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara is one of my most anticipated books of 2022. Her third novel is consists of three parts set in 1893, 1993 and 2093, all featuring different characters named David Bingham in an alternative version of New York. The first part is set in the late 19th century where New York is part of the Free States and in which same-sex relationships and marriages are accepted as the norm. David’s wealthy grandfather has set up an arranged marriage for him to Charles Griffith while David is drawn to Edward Bishop. The second part addresses AIDS and sees Hawaii-born David having an affair with Charles, with flashbacks to the life of David’s father and the third part is about the impact of a series of pandemics across the 21st century. The novel was already well developed by the time COVID-19 came along, with the consequence that the second half feels less speculative than it was probably intended to be. Despite the connections and recurring motifs in each of the three parts, the vastly different settings means that in some ways I find it more appealing to consider the book as three stand-alone novellas. Although I wasn’t completely convinced ‘To Paradise’ hangs together coherently as a single novel, Yanagihara’s prose is consistently excellent throughout and explores some interesting themes which are ultimately about what it means to be free. Many thanks to Picador for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Like so many other people, I loved A Little Life, although it broke my heart. To Paradise sort of broke my head – it's beautifully written and very engaging, but it's also very complicated and quite confusing. The book is divided into three sections, each told 100 years apart (1893, 1993 and 2093), telling the story of people who live in the same square in New York City at these different times (although part two is set mainly in Hawaii). Each story individually works really well, but the way they weave together is less clear; the characters in each section have the same names (there is always a David, for example, and always a Charles or a Charlie), but that seems to be the only relation. I think I assumed the sections would have more linking them, and kept waiting for that to happen. But – BUT. It's intricate and fascinating and vast - covering 300 years, and following the changes in society that have happened in that time. Appropriately enough, the world of 2093 has been ravaged by pandemic after pandemic, and there's much in the dystopian description that feels unpleasantly familiar. We are never quite allowed in, never told exactly what is going on; instead, we walk alongside these characters, or read their letters, or listen in on their conversations, and have to piece together the rest ourselves. Another writer might have struggled to make this satisfying, but with Yanagihara, there's no issue. A very bold and effective book.

REVIEW: To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

To Paradise is a book split into three distinct parts, 3 different books/novels. We follow a family and a townhouse in Washington Square Park. 1893 New York which is part of the Free States where people may marry and be with whoever they please, 1993 Manhattan overwhelmed with the AIDS epidemic, and 2093 in a world riven with plagues and under totalitarian rule.

This is a hard novel to talk about and review. I was highly anticipating Hanya Yanagiahara’s new novel after reading A Little Life in 2020 and it ruining me but becoming one of my favourite books I have read. So did I go into this with maybe too high of expectations? Maybe. I think I partly didn’t absolutely love it due to it being three separate and distinct stories within the book. The characters have the same names in each story; David, Charles, Edward etc but they are not related stories.

Book 1 we follow David. He lives with his grandfather, as his parents have died, and his grandfather is his closest companion. His grandfather tries to arrange a marriage for him to a wealthy older man called Charles. But David meets and falls head over hells for a poor man, Edward. This story wasn’t my favourite, as I didn’t feel fully invested in the characters. I found the dynamics between family and love really interesting. David was also a complex character; he is awkward and not the best socially. The story ended ambiguously which sometimes annoys me, but I was happy with the mystery it left me with.

Book 2 started of strong. David a paralegal is in a relationship with an older man who is in a senior position where he works, set amongst the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic. This was one of my favourite parts of this book, looking at the relationship between these characters who are together but are very different and David’s relationships and feelings towards Charles’ friends and David’s friends reactions to his relationship with Charles. Then it switches to a letter from David’s father where is documents his life in Hawaii and how David grew up and how their family fell apart. This was the part that I enjoyed the least out of the whole novel. I found it really dragged and it was really boring, which made it hard for me to want to pick the novel up.

Book 3 is the longest. Initially, from the first chapter I wasn’t sure about it, but by the end I really liked it. We follow Charlie who is living with her husband and works at a science assistant type role. And we also switched to the Charlie’s grandfather in the years before which were my favourite parts. I liked seeing how pandemics, illnesses and drugs used to fight illness have an effect on a child temperament as well as the differing views and paths the characters took in regard to the handling of the pandemics. This book really moved me as I even cried near the end, and I think it should have maybe been a standalone novel.

Overall, I was a little disappointed in this book due to the separate sections. Part 3 was my favourite part.

There is so much I could say about this, but have tried to distill into the requisite characters.⁣
This is supposed to be an epic story set across three eras, but reads more like three separate stories set at different times.⁣
I'll spare the synopsis (as I'm not sure I could do them justice in the space I have here) but the stories - story one set in an alternate reality in the late 19th C, story two set in the late 1980s and story three set spanning 2040 - 2080s - all have different characters with the same names, the same general setting (New York, Washington Square) and broad overarching themes and motifs of same-sex love acceptance and adversity, disability acceptance, all the way up to colonialism and the fight for personal and societal freedom.
However despite these links, this 700+ page novel lacks some coherence and cohesion; instead of being a multi-faceted look at how life is connected through the ages, it instead reads like two novellas and a not-so-developed final story - none feel fully fleshed out which meant that none of the characters drew me in in the way they should and could have.
The more ambiguous plot endings should have frustrated me in a good way, leaving me wanting more, instead I shrugged them off and barely gave them a second thought. And this is presumably not how I should be feeling after reading this.⁣
If you're really interested, go for it, otherwise proceed with caution!

Ambitious, well-written, well-researched; Yanagihara's "Paradise" is one of those reading experiences that leave a mark on your thoughts long after you've turned the last page.

DNF
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I was looking forward to this book. I held my breath while I was waiting for my ARC request to be approved & did a happy dance when the email confirmation came through.
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I started reading on Monday & this afternoon, I fell asleep and dropped my Kindle. Something about this book is like a soporific. The writing is incredible but the characters are flat. They're dull & limited. I was also unsettled by the portrayal of the gay characters & the casual racism. To make it worse, this is 3 short stories, mashed into a 704 page novel. At page 211, I'm giving up.

A cover that drew me in to discover more! 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. It says a lot that I am still thinking about this book a few days after finishing it - I will definitely be recommending this one!

I’m going to put this out there: I didn’t like A Little Life. What people read as a heartbreaking story was to me an over the top display of emotional manipulation that didn’t make me feel close to crying. Because of this I wanted to give Yanagihara another chance, just so I can ‘get’ what everyone else is talking about when it comes to her writing. Because there is nothing more unpopular than disliking a very well loved book.

However, this new release did not shine any light on it.

I have no idea what she was attempting to achieve here. You have three stories, all with the connection of the characters having the same name. This might be a literary experiment, but damn it felt flat. You have three stories. The first was the most enjoyable. I loved the build up and the ambiguous world building. But then it just ends. We don’t find out what happens afterwards and I was incredibly disappointed that we didn’t get any answers.

The second story was fine. I didn’t love it or hate it, because we didn’t have enough time to explore.

The third story… what the hell was that? This one takes up half the book and it just ruined the book.

This feels as if Yanagihara had a deadline and three underdeveloped stories she didn’t know what to do with so she mushed them together to try and make something out of it.

I feel sorry for the people going into this thinking it will be another A Little Life, because this must’ve been such a letdown.

It took me a long time to get into this but I had to DNF because I wasn't enjoying myself and I wasn't learning anything new. The book is just too long for me to keep reading when I'm not having a great time.

To Paradise has to be one of the most anticipated novel of 2022, and one I have been looking forward to for over six months. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is one of the best books I have ever read, and in my opinion she should have won the 2015 Booker Prize, so To Paradise had a lot to live up to;and it did in every way. Set over three hundred years in a very different New York than we know, this is a powerful and at times frightening read that is very revelant to our world today.

To Paradise has three very different stories that are all linked by family lineage and place, a house in Washington Square New York. New York in 1893 is an alterate New York, part of a number of states that have joined together to make ‘Free States’, with their own laws where same sex realtions are legal and all children are educated.The Bingham family are one of the founnding families of this Free State, and have many charitable institutions to help those less fortunate. But just what is free? David Bingham lives with his grandfather in Washington Square, when he is introduced to Charles Griffith, a widower whom his grandfather is hoping he will marry. However, David is in love with someone else, someone his family wouldn’t approve of and someone he is not free to marry. This opens the idea of freedom, he isn’t free to make his own choices and be part of his heritage.

In 1993, we meet David and Charles’s descendents, both living in Washington Square. In 1993 the Aids Epidemic is at a high, with many of Charles’s friends having the disease. David is much younger than Charles and keeps his heritage a secret. His father is a Bingham and a descendant of Hawaian Royalty. Throught a letter we learn of the difficult life of David’s father, in a Hawaii that has been colonised by the American’s wiping out their identity. As in 1893, David and his father struggle with their identity, their place in the world and in their family.

2093, and we have the first female narrator, who is a Griffith. I think this is the most frightening story and takes up half the book. We are not given the name of the narrartor, which at first infuriated me, but as I read on I understood the reason behind this; she represents many of citizens. The endearing part of this story is the young woman’s relationship with her grandfather, who tries to protect her from the worst this world has to offer. This is a New York where people live in fear of illness and try to pre-empt the next pandemic, where food and water are rationed under Totatilitarian rule. Via correspondance between the grandfather, Charles Griffith and a friend Hanya Yanighara explores how the world came to this shocking place.

Hanya Yanagihara’s writing is simply sublime, drawing you into these stories that elicit emotions you never knew you had. Her characters are so well drawn, with a verisimilitude that makes you feel you know them and you are part of their lives. This is a multi layered read that is very relevant to the world we live in at the moment, and the future that we could face. What I really got from this book was that no matter who you are, how much money you have, what your status is, you are never truely free, that we are defined by who we are and by our past and our place in the world. It was the final part of the story that shocked me with Hanya Yanigara holding a mirror up to what could be our future, where we live with the consequences of climate change and the constant fear of becoming unwell.

Interstingly I was asked what my favourite story was of the three. I thought it would be the first part set in 1893, but surprisingly, even to me, it was the final part. The relatonship between Granfather and Granddaughter was simply beautiful. It had an innocence to it, a bond that could never be broken, and even in a world of fear and illness, where the government rules, that innocence remained. I was shocked at the intensisty of this story, the forboding that took over, but it really made me think hard about the world we live in.

To say I loved To Paradise is a huge understatement. There was a lot to live up to with A Little Life being one of my favourite books ever, and it was just as powerful as I had expected. I have no doubt that we will be talking about this book a lot this year and I am sure it will win many awards, and be another huge success. Masterful story telling with a breathtaking vision make this a masterpiece; Absolutley amazing!!

This review is going to be short, because I don’t want to spoil a book that won’t be out for another two months. What I will say is that To Paradise is very different to A Little Life. It’s an interesting book in its own right, and I won’t be surprised if it’s nominated for several prizes - but it would be for very different reasons.

To Paradise is made up of three parts - one in the late 19th century, one in the late 20th and one in the late 21st. The stories are set in an alternative version of the world we know, and each one is made up of a set of distinct, yet strangely familiar characters. Admittedly I didn’t enjoy part two as much as I’d hoped, but parts one and three were incredible - particularly three, which takes up almost half the novel, and I honestly couldn’t put down. I would definitely recommend this to fans of literary fiction.

(To add, I will also say that I think it’s a good thing that To Paradise is so different from A Little Life - I think if Yanagihara tried to recreate it, we would all be left disappointed. Instead, we’re presented with something new that can be judged on its own merit, and not that of its predecessor.)

Like many people, I’d been eagerly awaiting To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara. I thought A Little Life was an incredible book and despite reading it nearly a decade ago there are moments and passages which have stayed with me for some time. It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I approached To Paradise. I wasn’t expecting another A Little Life, but I was hoping to be swept away by the book and find myself immersed. To Paradise, like A Little Life is a chunky book, but I love big books as I love getting lost in something. I was lucky enough to get a proof copy through Netgalley but had also pre-ordered it too so I ended up reading both copies (there was no way I was holding a 700 page book in the bath – that way disaster lies).

This is a book of three parts, each exploring a different time frame. The first is set in 1893 in an imagined American past, the second is in 1993 set in both New York and Hawaii and the third set in 2093 in a world ravaged by multiple pandemics. Each section is set, in part, in a grand house on Washington Square in New York. Character names, such as Charles, Edward and David are reused and there are continuing themes of loss, grief and a yearning for something more in all three parts.

I felt the first part was the strongest, I fell in love with the book and enjoyed the alternate history which Yanagihara had created. It’s beautifully written and, as expected, packs an emotional punch. There are some really interesting aspects, particularly the political landscape where New York is part of the Free States and gay people can marry freely. It’s a very poignant and beautiful read but it ends very abruptly and I have to admit to feeling bereft. I could have read a whole book about the Free States and its creation – the world building was remarkable.

This may be why I wasn’t a huge fan of the second part, set in an imagined 1993 and it is split into two parts, one of which I found really hard going. I enjoyed the third section far more. This part is a future dystopian tale, and Yanagihara writes about a New York which has been ravaged by pandemics. Again, the world building is remarkable, and the depiction of a place being slowly controlled by the state was very unsettling. In this New York, Manhattan has been divided into zones, inhabitants are assigned job roles and they are forced to marry by the age of 35. The marriages do not require any sort of romantic love particularly as they are state mandated in order to raise birth rates. This future New York is a much hotter place and there is much air pollution – inhabitants wear cooling suits and helmets, and it is a bleak and joyless place.

We learn of this world via two alternate viewpoints. The first is Charlie, a young woman whose parents were insurgents and in this imagined future, this means that she must pay for their crimes. She is also in an arranged married to a cold and distant man whom she barely knows. The second is from Charlie’s grandfather’s letters to his friend. He is a scientist whose work has been instrumental in systems that are now in place to contain pandemics. This section jumps around in time, from the imagined present to the imagined past and back again. It feels actually quite terrifying at times as Yanagihara does do world building very well. I love dystopian books, and perhaps weirdly, do not have an issue reading books about pandemics and I also love a multi viewpoint novel, so really this section should have been a huge winner for me. But it’s long. Really long – almost half of the 700 pages of To Paradise. It started to feel bloated and I think it would have benefited from a good edit if I’m honest.

I think that part of the issue was that the themes which are addressed became quite repetitive. Any one of those parts could have been a book in their own right so it started to feel a bit too much. There’s not a lot of joy in the book, there’s a lot of sorrow and suffering and perhaps I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for that. I’m writing this a couple of days after finishing it (it took me two weeks to read, which is a long time for me), and I still feel exhausted by the heavy themes and the unrelenting bleakness.

But, saying that, the writing is absolutely gorgeous. She is so incredibly skilled at creating characters who you do care about and whose lives you feel you know intimately. There were many passages which stopped me in my tracks, and it did give me pause for thought. There’s no doubt that Yanagihara has accomplished something remarkable in To Paradise and I have huge respect for her and I’m pleased I read it, it’s a book which I think will stay with me, but I found it a very challenging read.

'The reason I really chose this place was because of its name: Davids Island. Not singular – David’s – but many, as if this land were inhabited not by an ever-changing population of (mostly) children, but by Davids. My son, in duplicate, at all different ages, doing all the things my son had liked to do at various points in his life. … There would be no misunderstandings, no concerns that the younger Davids might be somehow different, somehow strange, because the older Davids would understand them. There would be no loneliness, because… they would only know one another… they would never know the agony of wanting to be someone else, for there was no one else to admire, no one else to envy.'

Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise has already attracted wildly divergent critical reactions – everything from ‘it’s a masterpiece’ to ‘it’s a boring, incoherent mess’. I suspect that even among those of us who like this novel, there will be little common ground. Yanagihara gives us so much to think with that we’re bound to come out thinking very different things.

To Paradise consists of two novellas and a novel. The first, ‘Washington Square’, is set in an alternative version of our nineteenth century where the territories that make up the United States are configured differently, with a few northeastern states making up the ‘Free States’, where same-sex marriages are legal and acceptable but white supremacy still rules. The second, ‘Lipo-Wao-Nahele’, starts with a young gay man weathering the AIDS epidemic in early 1990s Manhattan, but flashes back to tell the story of his father, a descendant of the last king of Hawai’i, who is convinced by a charismatic friend to try and start a new community on a scrappy bit of land that still belongs to him. The third, ‘Zone Eight’, flashes back and forward in a pandemic-ravaged twenty-first century, narrated alternately by a grandfather and his granddaughter living in an increasingly totalitarian state. The links between these three sections are delicate and speculative rather than solid, and I can understand why many readers have found this frustrating. Why do protagonists called David and Charles continually reoccur, alongside secondary characters called Edward, Peter and Eden? Does it matter that all three narratives centre on a house in Washington Square? However, I like questionably interconnected stories (Nina Allan’s work also comes to mind), and the way it’s left to the readers to figure out their own theories about why these three stories sit together.

One big clue, I think, is in the passage I quoted at the start of the review. All three stories feature narrators whom Yanagihara is careful not to label as cognitively disabled or mentally ill, but, for their different reasons, are unable to interact with the world with the kind of motivation felt by a ‘normal’ person. Yanagihara suggests that there are possible worlds in which these disconnected, directionless people would be happy, but that society is not built for them, and so they are cursed to eternal loneliness or to desperately seeking human connection, whatever the cost. The reader’s own impatience with these characters is, I think, part of the point; breaking all the ‘rules’ of fiction-writing, they are characters without agency, who let life happen to them. However, I don’t think this is just about how we treat social outcasts or what kind of sympathy we owe them, although those themes are present. As each of these characters is taken to their own version of ‘paradise’ at the end of their book, Yanagihara shows us how seductive the idea of surrendering control and letting someone else decide our destiny is, even for those of us who think we are moving steadily onwards into the future we planned. This is perhaps especially the case when the world is falling apart; as Charles, the once hugely-ambitious grandfather in ‘Zone Eight’, reflects as his society descends into chaos, ‘The past is no longer relevant; the future has failed to materialise’.

Having said this, I think I would agree with other critics that there is a problem in the structure of To Paradise. I found the second section by far the weakest (I struggled to get through it, whereas the other two had me gripped), and I’m still not clear why Yanagihara included the lengthy party sequence, which seems divorced from the broader themes of the novel except insofar as it deals with impending death. While the segment at Lipo-Wao-Nahele was much more thematically relevant, I’m relieved it wasn’t any longer, as I found it almost too miserable to read (which leads me off on a bit of a tangent about books being ‘depressing’ or ‘miserable’; for me, the presence of terrible events in a novel does not automatically make it depressing, whereas novels that are about very banal things can feel blackly awful. A Little Life was absolutely heartbreaking, for example, but I didn’t find it as grim as Lipo-Wao-Nahele).

There have also been a number of reviews that suggest that Yanagihara presents yet another cliched dystopia in ‘Zone Eight’, and that this section brings nothing new to the table. While I’m very sympathetic to those who hate literary writers appropriating SF tropes and pretending they’ve reinvented the wheel (I’m looking at you Ian McEwan), I felt Yanagihara’s approach here was closer to Ishiguro’s strategy in Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun – the granddaughter’s blank affect even mimics Ishiguro’s prose style. The worldbuilding is not especially detailed – although Yanagihara is horribly convincing on strategies for containment of a global pandemic – but I don’t think it was intended to be. What Yanagihara does so well here, especially in the grandfather’s sections, is to show how a society gradually descends into dystopia rather than starting with the dystopia itself. And, unlike many boring dystopian novels I’ve read, she’s not afraid to find elements of the utopic within the dystopia – as the grandfather reflects, there is a place and a purpose for his granddaughter in this society, whereas there might not have been had she lived elsewhen. A world of ‘Davids’ would have no hope, no joy, but it might also have less longing, less pain.

This novel encompasses 3 ‘books’ set in 1893, 1993 and 2093. They are set in dystopian versions of the US and are all seemingly unlinked however they share the same themes and character names.

This novel uses its unique premise to explore themes such as freedom, illness, identity, privilege, betrayal, desire, love, notions of utopia and familial duty. The themes recurred through all 3 parts and were examined in different ways throughout.

The style of this novel was highly unusual and I would just start warming to characters and getting invested in a storyline and we would move forward 100 years to unlinked characters and events. It was quite jarring however I liked all 3 settings and sets of characters. I enjoyed each of the 3 books and the themes they were exploring, however I don’t know if the format was entirely successful for me.

I haven’t read any of Yanagihara’s other books so had no preconceptions going into this. I enjoyed the writing style, but it was very bleak throughout with not a lot of relief.

Overall I thought this was well written and ambitious but slightly missed the mark for me.

AD - This copy was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review