In many ways, the premise of To Paradise, the follow up to Hanya Yanagihara's smash hit novel A Little Life, is simple. Three parts telling stories across three centuries in 'American' history. 'American,' here, is in quotes as it's reminiscent of, but not identical to America as we know it.

In Part One we experience the highs and lows of romance and coming-of-age in the form of twenty-something bachelor David Bingham in 1893 New York. He's set up for an arranged marriage by his grandfather, with whom he lives in Washington Square, to a wealthy widower named Charles Griffith. Instead, however, David finds himself drawn to the penniless but enigmatic music teacher, Edward Bishop. Will he surrender to his fate as a Bingham and marry Charles or give up everything he knows and loves and let his heart lead him to Edward?

Part Two takes us a century into the future. In 1990s New York, we witness David Bingham (not the same as Part One but an alternate universe David) in an affair with Charles, a senior partner at the law firm where David works as a paralegal. David, in this storyline, is a young Hawaiian man whose father is lying ill in a hospital back on the island where he comes from, and their two narratives swap back and forth as we learn the history of David's life.

Finally, at about the 50% mark of the novel, we come to Part Three: a semi-dystopian (though all too real feeling) pandemic novel. Set in the 2090s, we follow a female narrator in New York who lives with her aloof husband who spends one free night every week out in the city. As she begins to unravel the mystery of her husband's affairs, we also hear about her father's sedition and grandfather's involvement in the government containment of many pandemics over the past few decades.

That is but a very brief and overly simplified synopsis of what this novel contains. In truth, each part serves as their own novel. The connections between the individual sections are tenuous, more thematic or through nomenclature. Motifs of a house in Washington Square, pandemics and illnesses, names like David, Charles, and Eden, and other 'easter eggs' pop up between the various sections. While these are fun allusions, at first, over time they become a bit tedious and do nothing to really serve the story besides allowing these sections to sit alongside one another as companions.

Unfortunately, I felt that while the technical aspects of this novel are exceptional, it lacked some of the heart or emotional power her previous two novels contained. For those coming to this after <i>A Little Life</i> looking for a tearjerker: look elsewhere. Though it has some moments of raw power, it's overall tone is not as suffocatingly sorrowful. Yes, it deals with depressing topics of loneliness, losing loved ones, and second guessing if you made the correct choices in life. But the characters are not lived with enough to pull your heartstrings as much as one might expect.

What Yanagihara does excellently is craft sentences that flow so naturally, you forget you're reading a book. There were quite a few times, particularly in the first two parts of this book, that completely absorbed me. I'd say the first half of this novel definitely kept my attention more and piqued my curiosity. Sitting at around 180 pages each, parts one and two are fine novellas that ask interesting questions of loyalty, fate, family and love. It was in the second half of the book that I became lost. The dystopian, pandemic elements paired with an alternating POV structure that felt drawn out and redundant led me to get bored and lose interest in these bigger themes. The ending also felt a bit lackluster in part three, perhaps because it echoes some of the ambiguity of part one and two's endings.

There is promise in this novel, and I'll be so curious to hear what others think about it when it's released in January. However, I can't help thinking this would have been better with some editing; not just condensing but shifting around in structure or playing with some other elements that would have tied the stories together more than just by name. Perhaps then we would have had a knockout that Yanagihara is capable of. Nonetheless, I expect to see endless commentary on this in 2022 and for it to make its way on to many lists. I hope it inspires discussion around what exactly IS America, and how do we grapple with where we have been and where we are now to inform the society, and people, we hope to become—and are becoming.

Thanks to Netgalley for providing an advanced copy. It's been years since I read A Little Life and I'd forgotten how absolutely absorbing Yanagihara's prose is. This is a novel in three parts, and could actually be three separate novels as the stories are linked tenuously through shared names and more strongly through themes of love, loyalty, identity and escape. Once again characters and writing style had me completely immersed and I finished this very long novel a lot quicker than others of similar length. Definitely recommend

This book consists of three separate, but connected, stories - the first two novella-length, the third long enough to be considered a novel in its own right - set in three different time periods, woven together by themes, names, locations and some related characters. You could, if you wanted, draw out a family tree for many of the characters, and while that might be interesting, it's certainly not necessary. Names are re-used in different time periods to illustrate and tie together themes and the positions/strengths/weaknesses of the characters.

The writing is immaculate, and despite its length and its complexities, and despite the fact that this is extremely clever, it is not a "difficult" book. I personally would have liked more resolved endings, particularly to the third story, but I can see why it was done in the way it was. I found the book's structure to be frustrating at times, but ultimately very impressive.

As a fangirl of A Little Life, I wanted this to be that again (as if!) - but although this didn't affect me in the same way, I still found it a very powerful read. It is quite possibly a novel that would appeal to those who found A Little Life to be too much, or too miserable, but who appreciated the skill in its writing.

That said, this does also make for grim reading at times, especially given the current global struggle with covid-19. I'd be very interested to know if, and how, Yanagihara changed it as she wrote, given the timing of its writing and publication. I unintentionally ended up reading this and simultaneously re-reading Station Eleven (by Emily St John Mandel) - which probably would have been just fine in 2019, but in 2021, possibly not the best plan!

One of the most anticipated novels of 2022 and one that, I think, might divide opinions just as Yanagihara’s previous hit, A Little Life did. I should confess to not having read A Little Life, at the time of publication, it sounded intriguing, but I’d had a long ‘to read’ pile and didn’t want to add another long novel to it.

To Paradise, then. The novel is structured around people with same names living, at some point of their lives, in the same house in New York’s Washington Square a hundred years apart: 1893, 1993 and 2093. Their New Yorks and Americas are quite different in some ways, same in others. This structure is what first attracted me to the novel, in interviews, Yanagihara said she wanted to explore different paths America could have taken. So, in 1893, David Bingham is a 28-year-old scion of one of founding families of the Free States where white people can love and marry who they like (black people are helped to cross from the segregated Southern states and then encouraged to move on to the West or Canada). David is at a crossroads, deciding whether to marry the older, stable, unimaginative Charles Griffith or dashing, penniless piano teacher Edward Bishop. Prone to long bouts of depression, he has led a secluded life controlled by his grandfather and this relationship between grandparents and grandchildren is a major theme of the novel. The first part reminded me of both Wharton and Henry James and I rather liked that.

In the second part, we move to 1993 and the unnamed but very much present AIDS epidemic where a young Hawaiian David lives with his much older lover Charles and reminisces about growing up with his grandmother. His father, also David carries on the narrative, writing from the hospital bed he has been confined to for some years. He reminisces of the time in his life he was involved with a different Edward Bishop, a man with revolutionary ideas to take back Hawaiian independence and dreams of being able to walk again and going to see his son. I found this part of the novel the weakest, lacking direction and at times, it was a struggle to keep reading if I am being honest.

The third part, set in future forms half of the novel. America is segregated again but this time into zones, ravaged by the climate change and frequent deadly pandemics. Charlie Bingham is a laboratory technician who misses her grandfather and wanders what her husband does on his weekly free nights. Her life is very different and basic – work, home, sleep, eat and it is apparent that in this bleak, dystopian version of America, most freedoms have been sacrificed to ensure basic survival. How this came about is slowly revealed in emails and letters written by Charlie’s grandfather Charles to his closest friend in Britain. Charles was an epidemiologist and involved in some of the decisions that led to the current state of things, and I found his narrative by far the most interesting and the best part of the whole novel. As we live in pandemic times, it is also the part of the novel that will surely resonate with most readers.

Apart from grandparent-grandchild relationships already mentioned, Yanagihara explores themes of love in its many forms, loneliness, feelings of inadequacy and not belonging, freedom, heritage and privilege. Her characters have the same names, but they are not the same people or even related. In another interview, I’d read that Binghams and Griffiths were some of the missionaries who came to Yanagihara’s native Hawaii and I thought it interesting how she used these names for foundation characters in her versions of what America could have been and what it could become. At times, I loved her writing, in the first part I thought how wonderful, a modern Wharton-esque style. I found the third part more and more affecting as the novel neared its end. I liked the ways in which she connected the three parts, the first narrative is re-told as a story in part three, a speech from part two makes its way into one of Charles’s emails.

At the same time, I also found the book quite uneven. The first part was enjoyable but also somewhat slight, the second part I already mentioned being a struggle while the third part was at times unnecessarily slow – but it did eventually win me over. At around 720 pages, this is a long novel and I thought the different versions of America Yanagihara imagined could have been explored more, especially in the first two parts (the second part didn’t seem particularly different) or from a different perspective. All of Yanagihara’s characters are from privileged backgrounds to some extent and it would have been interesting to hear from someone else, Charlie’s husband in the third part for example. Three and a half stars which I’m rounding up to four for the ending.

My thanks to Pan Macmillan, Picador and Netgalley for the opportunity to read To Paradise.

I have prevaricated about writing this review. Partly this is due to knowing it's by the author of A Little Life which is one of my favourite books and which I obsessed about in a rare way. It took over my life for two weeks.

I have been mulling over how I feel about this book.

The first section is mainly about David who is a member of a rich family in an alternate America in 1893. In the Free States people may live and love how they please seemingly. David has had illnesses in the past and his Grandfather wants him to marry a man who will care for him, but David falls in love with a penniless musician. He wants a life "in colour". Yanagihara explores themes of freedom and choice and how love and hate is a spectrum. She isn't afraid of looking at the dark recesses of the human personality and how we justify our motivations to ourselves and others. David is not always a character you warm to.


The 2nd section is set in a Manhattan in 1993 during the AIds epidemic. A young Hawaiian man lives with a wealthy older man to whom he reveals little of his background and identity. We find out more about this through his father's story. The theme of exile from your own culture is explored here.

The 3rd section is set in 2093 in a totalitarian world in which people's lives are controlled by disease. A grandfather has the care of his granddaughter who seems to be "damaged" in some way. He loves her but what is his own background?

Yanagihara is like a composer using recurring themes and instruments/notes to link the three parts together. On a superficial level, names and a house recur. More profoundly, themes such as wealth and poverty, power and weakness, racial identity, disease/illness resonate. It asks what is a family?
The author says in an address "to the Bookseller" that
"... time and progress are not linear but a loop, one that pleats and folds back on itself, the future becoming the past before you know it "


The role of science and its responsibilities reminded me of The People in the Trees. The loving bonds between the grandfather and Charlie reminded me of the unconditional paternal love that Jude receives in A little Life from his tutor, Harold. However, there are more conditions attached here…

There is much in the third part that will be familiar from our own of a pandemic but also much more that is thought provoking and disturbing in many ways. Like The People in the Tress and Frankenstein it asks difficult questions about science and how this balances with a human's freedoms and rights.

That’s the plot and analysis of the themes but what about the emotional response?
I didn't engage with it in the same way that I did with A Little Life. This was more than just being about a non- linear structure. Both Davids are hard to empathise with. Charlie is probably the character that won my heart. She reminded me a bit of Ishiguro's Klara (no spoilers here about why)

Yes it's a powerful and well written book with many important things to say, but I think I may need to let it settle some more or reread it to understand more about it.
It was like eating an expensive tasting menu in a top- class restaurant. Some flavours were there so subtly and others were not what you were expecting and maybe you thought at the end you were still hungry but you weren’t really. I need more time to digest this book.

I'm still processing this, I'm not sure how to write what I feel in a short review. It's an epic book, I read it on the kindle but I imagine the physical copy is massive.
The story covers a span of hundreds of years in New York. The portion set in the 2090s is a little dystopia and given our recent experience with pandemics a bit more scary than it would have been if their book was published a few years ago.
The 3 sections are all quite different but there are themes running through, not least the use of the same character names. It's a skill of the writer that even though the names are the same I never confused the characters.
It's a book I just want to talk about. I need someone else to read it so I can discuss the characters, the stories, what might have happened after we left them.

I'm going to preface this review by saying that I haven't read A Little Life. But I know the hype, and I know that a lot of people will go into reading To Paradise expecting something like more of the same. But you shouldn't. To Paradise isn't that. It's something entirely different.

I had two very vague ideas about To Paradise before I read it:
1: It's long.
2: It's split into three parts.

I didn't know what to expect aside from that.

At first, the book seems quite straightforward. The first section is set in the late 1800s and follows a number of characters that you get to know quite intimately. I loved this first section and was excited to see where the characters would find themselves in the second section.

Admittedly, I was confused for a spell once I hit the section sections. The characters I had come to know and love were all there, except they weren't. This section of the story follows characters with the same names as those from the first section, but the very essence of these characters is entirely different. It's not the same story, it's not the same time in history and it's not the same people.

And again, in the third section, we see characters with the same names but without much of the essence of what had made them who they were before in the previous sections of the book.

Somehow I feel as though I should have hated this chopping and changing of characters. But it works, and it works incredibly well. Across the expanse of the book, I found myself piecing together parts of the different sections, subtle nods to the characters as they had been before. Maybe I was reading too much into things. Maybe I wasn't. That's part of the experience of immersing yourself in this volume.

It's a long book, hundreds and hundreds of pages, and it was intimidating to start into, but aside from a section in the middle that I found to move a bit more slowly than other parts of the story, it never felt as though I was trawling my way through hundreds of pages. To Paradise reads almost as a series of short stories, in a sense. There are so many characters, so many stories and so many emotions fit into these pages. There's a true master of storytelling here. Mostly I forgot that I was reading, and when I wasn't reading, I was finding excuses so that I could make it so that I was.

For me, my favourite part of the book is the third section, which actually accounts for about half of the page count. Between the characters, the setting and the story, I often found myself thinking that I could just have easily been reading an Ishiguro or Murakami novel. It's dystopian, it moves quickly, but it takes its time to piece together for the reader what's actually happening. And it doesn't give too much away. The reader must work for it, and there is often some ambiguity which I felt really added to the story rather than seeming frustrating or confusing. The suspense toward the end had me incredibly uneasy, a feat that for me, no book before now has managed with such tangibility.

This one was an easy five stars from me. To paradise and beyond. An excellent read.

I’ve finished this book about ten hours now and yet it feels early for a review. Still, it’s fresh in my mind after reading it for nearly three weeks and if I don’t write something now, I might find it more difficult as time goes on. Not that I will forget the book, I’m just not sure what I think about it.

Initial reactions:

-Far tooooooo long. The middle story in particular felt like it would never end, for reasons I’ll expand on.

-Did I enjoy it? I’m not sure if you could say that. Some of the writing was entrancing, and some of the stories immersive. I can say it was difficult but memorable and I don’t think I’ll be forgetting it for a while yet, especially the third part.

Ok, so with that out of the way - This book is in three sections, that take place in 1893, 1993 and 2093. The first is set in in Washington Square, New York. The main character is David Bingham, an orphan who lives with his Grandfather. The family is very much of old money, and were founders of the free states - a group of states who have broken away, still connected to the wider United States, but differing from the ‘Southern Colonies’ and ‘The West.’ Same sex marriage is the default spousal setting in this society, and though it may seem extremely liberal on first viewing it is still divided by class and race - the Binghams have servants and black people fleeing the south are given safe passage through the Free states on their way to Canada. David is a lonely, sometimes sickly young man and his grandfather is trying to organise a marriage for him - this is how the original founding families maintain their grip on the upper echelons of society - but he has his own ideas on love and his future.

I did find this part very readable and was invested in David’s story. It had the feel of an Edith Wharton or Henry James novel. Looking back, this was probably the part that I was most invested in. I’m not going to say enjoyed.

Part two is divided into two sections. The first is set during another pandemic - that of the Aids criss of the 1990’s. I quickly realised that the author was using the same names for the characters, which was a bit confusing and we were back in the same Washington Square apartment building. It was good to be in a world that was slightly familiar but I did spend some time wondering what the connection was between these stories, and wondering exactly where this book was going.

The second half of part two are was where the book really began to sag for me. I understood that it was about the colonisation of Hawaii, and maybe I’m just not interested in that enough, but it came in the form of what felt like the longest letter in literature. There didn’t seem to be a break in it and I was all out of sympathy for the father character, who I ended up disliking for being so weak. I just couldn’t get emotionally invested in this part and the writing became to annoy me - some of the sentences just meandered around the house. I’d given up on names and connections by this stage and this section couldn’t end quickly enough for me.

Eventually, I made it to Part three. This is the largest section of the book, by my kindle reckoning twice the size of the other two stories, taking up 50% of the book. I’d imagine that it’s this part that readers and reviewers will focus on the most. It is set between 2050 and 2093 in a totalitarian, dystopian , barely recognisable, New York. The far right has used successive pandemics to push through more draconian measures, and citizens live in different sections, depending on their social status and position in the regime. It’s basically 1984 meets a nightmare version of where the present world seems to be going in a handcart.

We’re following Charlie and her grandfather Charles in this part (names again). The grandfather is a scientist and his story is told in the form of letters - Charlie’s story is told in the first person narrative. This is a place of relocation camps, crematoriums, waves of the virus that traumatically, affect children, containment centres that people don’t return from, and sure we can’t forget good ol’ global warming and hunger. I really struggled with this at times. This was the first fiction I have read that relates to the pandemic and it just felt really close to the bone and at times an utterly depressing vision of where society could go. At the same time, I kept going as there is a narrative drive to this section that for me wasn’t present in the middle section and I was interested in the story of young Charlie. Maybe there will never be a place where we can look back at pandemics in the rear view mirror. But it felt too soon for me and I couldn't wait to get out of this nightmare of a place.

This is the longest review I’ve ever written, as befitting a novel lasting 720 pages. It’s a complex unwieldy beast of a book that I could never quite get to grips with in terms of how the stories connected. There were recurring themes such as loneliness and love without affection, sexuality, orphans and role models, inheritance in terms of status and culture, but the book as a whole just felt cold and clinical at times with parts that never quite clicked together. I read a novella just before I finished this novel and it felt like water on a desert- I just wanted a book that told a story with economical prose and descriptions, that was short and to the point

There is a lot to recommend in this book, especially the first part and some of the third section, (depending on how ready you are for covid related fiction) and there were times when I disappeared into the writing. It’s certainly memorable and it’s only by writing this review that I have helped to clarify how I felt it. Maybe the problem is with me - but there just weren’t enough colours in this book, which is what I needed. I’m not going to recommend it because I felt it didn't engage me enough but if you are about to embark on it, I wish you well. I was going to say it would be a good book if you were going into isolation for a couple of weeks, but maybe not.

Disturbing, unsettling from the outset and brilliant.

This is a novel in 3 parts set over 3 centuries - 1893, 1993 and 2093. Each part deals with love, relationships, sexuality and family within different social contexts. The first is an alternative America, briefly it seems as if we are in familiar wealthy 19th century New York, but this quickly shifts when we see that same sex marriages are the norm. The second part is set within the gay community, at a time when Aids was causing so many to die and the third part is in a terrifying dystopian future. Here all the fears you've ever had about totalitarianism, pandemics, climate crises are realised.

It can be a frustrating read. Things aren't resolved and I was certainly left wanting more. I wonder if Yanagihara makes a wry nod to this in the final part, when storytellers populate a main square and one comments that he will end before finishing a tale - to groans from the audience.

I hesitated about 4 or 5 stars for this book - I settled on 5 because it is brilliant, but it shook me in a way that isn't particularly welcome living as we are in the middle of a pandemic.

I approached this book with a great deal of apprehension after being completely hollowed out by ALL, and after hearing disconcerting things about the content of her debut, TPITT. Hanya’s first two novels have both focused on extremely uncomfortable and traumatising themes, whereas this did not feel like that at all.

The novel is divided into three separate sections spanning across three centuries in three imaginings of America. Despite the shared location of Washington Square Park, and the recurrent recycling of character names (there are a lot of david’s!), it isn’t always abundantly clear how (or if) these sections interlink with one another.

We begin in a 19th century Dickensian alt-verse in which individuals are free to love and marry whomever they please, and end in a dystopian future governed by totalitarian law and ravaged by plagues and pandemics. In the midst of all of this lie various references to Hawaii, and the way in which its history and people have been so heavily impacted by America’s involvement on their land - one of the focuses of section two of the novel is the character of King ‘David’ Kalākaua, the last King of Hawaii who ruled from 1874 until 1891 when Hawaii was stripped of its monarchy (incidentally just before TP first begins). With this considered, i don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hanya had chosen to recycle the name ‘David’ for many of her characters, and if anything this understanding of Hawaii’s history made me appreciate the content even more.

At its heart, I think this novel is about love, both unconditional and unrequited; romantic love shared between individuals, one-sided love not reciprocated in relationships, a love shared between grandparent and grandchild, and the love poured into this novel by Hanya for Hawaii.

The more I reflect upon this book, the more questions are left unanswered. It is not by any means a straightforward novel. As always, Hanya leaves much up to the reader to unpack themselves which can at times feel frustrating and confusing, particularly with a book of this length and with no clear plot point. There were also various points throughout the novel where the content felt a quite problematic, so i will be interested to hear what other people think when they read it.

Thank you so much to Picador & Book Break for sending me this proof.

<b>Three stories, which seem to have nothing in common, connected by themes such as racism, sexuality, loneliness, migration, complex family relationships, a yearning to be loved, and illnesses.</b>

I wasn’t a fan of A Little Life. In fact, I DNF. I found it too sad, too graphic, too descriptive, too cruel. And still, the part I read has been etched into my mind forever. And that’s why I decided to read To Paradise. I loved the author’s writing, and the premise reminded me of Cloud Cuckoo Land, another epic tale with multiple timelines in different ages. And that one is just one of my favorite reads of 2021. The books couldn’t be different, though. And still, if you look at those themes …

The book is divided into three parts. A story about David, a wealthy loner whose parents died from an infectious disease. It’s 1893, and HY shows us an alternative America. David lives in the free states where being queer is normal, but Black people aren’t allowed citizenship. When he meets poor Edward, he falls head over heels. But what are Edward’s intentions?

Then the book moves to 1993, to Hawaiian David (the beautiful cover is a Hawaiian fisher boy in 1898, by Dutch painter Herbert Vos), being in a relationship with Charles, an older man, while AIDS and death are everywhere in the gay community. When one of Charles’s friends is dying, David receives a letter from his estranged father.

Finally, the last part of the book moves to a female first-person narrative. Charlie is married, but doesn’t really know her husband, while pandemics, climate change, and a totalitarian regime control life. This part goes back and forth from 2093 to forty/fifty years before, and also tells the story of Charlie’s grandfather Charles. While the first two stories are pretty stilted, this one is scary as hell.

The blurb calls the story a symphony, and I believe that description fits this book very well. Slow and vulnerable at first. Then turned on more firmly because of the increasing tension. Switching again to a calmer pace like an intermezzo. Then building up to a crescendo, becoming more and more bombastic until you are completely immersed.

Some people love symphonies, and some people hate them. And that will also be the case with To Paradise. It’s a monstrosity, the pacing is rather slow, the sentences are long, and it isn’t easy to connect the stories. This isn’t a book to read because you want to love the characters or laugh or cry. The book radiates aloofness and is written in a rather formal language. But it’s a warning to all of us and one to reflect on. Because if we continue like this, the world might end up in terror and fear, and we’ll lose all the progress we’ve made.

I doubted my rating. The first two stories were definitely a four-star and sometimes even a five-star read, but the last story was long, and it felt a bit too … much? All those pandemics and zones and numbers and huge information dumps ... But it’s also the only one which gave me a lump in my throat, and the stories together made me muse and think about our world right now. And that’s why, in the end, I rated the whole book four stars. I truly hope we and our kids and grandkids will never end up in so much fear.

If, after reading my review, you think this book might be too much for you (particularly part III) and you like YA, check out The Outrage by William Hussey. Similar themes (without the pandemics) and so much easier to read.

I just loved the portrait on the cover of this book and didn't twig it was by the author of A Little Life which is a real marmite book and I 'm pretty sure this huge (over 700 pages) tome will be one too. I don't like marmite and I'm afraid I didn't much like this book either.

The narrative is set around three time periods in an alternative United States of America but all based around a house in Washington Square and with characters who share the same name.The structure reminded me of Cloud Atlas and the three seperate stories could have been published as threes eperate books in a trilogy but huge books seem to be the trend at present.

I found it slow, often confusing and the characters didn't hold my interest. It might just be my headspace at the moment but I found it difficult and can't say I enjoyed reading it.

(3.9 stars rounded up) I knew nothing about this book before I started reading. I hadn’t read the synopsis; I wanted to go into it as I’d gone into A Little Life and go where the tide took me. And, boy, I wasn’t expecting such a choppy ride! I’ll put the rest in the next paragraph in case you too don’t want to know anything……..





……the first part was perfect. It moved me and nearly made me cry at points. Every emotion was covered and tugged at and ripped and rebuilt. I loved it. I was shocked and jolted to suddenly find myself thrown into part two and had no idea what I’d missed, leading me to check online that my Kindle wasn’t playing tricks on me. I was gutted to find that we wouldn’t be returning to part one and I would never find out what happened. This disappointment carried me through part two, which I didn’t enjoy nearly half as much. I was glad that it was the shortest part of the three. By the time I was jolted to the finale, the longest part, I was a bit more prepared for the rest of this voyage, almost as though I’d been handed some motion sickness tablets. And I really did need them, ‘cause we were chucked about so much in this third part. I’ll admit that it took a lot of work to follow the threads and the characters as I found myself thinking back to their previous storylines and incarnations (if they did indeed have previous incarnations?!)… my interest did wane at points, perhaps because of the last two years we’ve all gone through in our real lives. The whole book was HUGE in so many ways and I don’t totally know yet how to wrap my head around it all. You could easily write a dissertation on the whole thing, so my paltry review here will never do justice to its mind-bending grandeur and I’m hesitant to offer any kind of neat summary or conclusion!? So maybe I’ll just leave it hanging and end things here? bye

I have been thinking what to write in my review of this ever since I finished reading it last night. What a book! A sequel to ‘A Little Life’ this is not, yet the themes and scope of the book are, if anything, even wider and more universal. This is a book that looks at sexuality, climate, the future, the past, survival, the politics of a pandemic and everything in between. With characters that grab you, so much so that when you move onto a different part of the book, you miss them, this can only be described as epic.

I love how varied the reviews are below and I think this book will continue to divide opinion when published. I personally loved it - in particular how Yanagihara draws you into people and their lives. I feel like I have been on a whirlwind tour of a lot of lives!

I won't describe the plot (although it was useful to read the synopses in other reviews to fill in any gaps and I will also look forward to reading the reviews when published) but just list the things I liked:

1 - the 'timeslips' created by either inheritance and use of the same names. You get the feel of 'same people, same place' even though they are not the same.

2 - the way she plays with your perceived ideas of gender (keeping character's names from you so you assume a certain identity until confirmed).

3 - how she links the three parts together through subtle intertextuality (such as references to another time before in a 'story' in the next timeline)

4 - how no story is completely resolved. This is also frustrating but - as the book details so much 'life' - it doesn't matter. The show goes on.

However, I was a bit disappointed with the 'pandemic' storyline in part 3. I don't like to think that our imagined future is now only defined by apocalypse and pandemics!

My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.

If you’ve read my review for A Little Life you know how much that novel means to me. Just looking at my hardback copy makes me feel all sorts of intense feelings. So, naturally, my expectations were high for To Paradise. At first, The Cloud Atlas-esque premise did intrigue me. ​​To Paradise is a door-stopper of a book that is divided into three ‘books’. These ‘books’ are united by their shared setting (New York) and themes (freedom, illness, identity, privilege, familial and romantic love, notions of utopia, familial duty vs self, betrayal, desire). On paper, this sounded amazing, and I was looking forward to being once again swept away by Yanagihara’s storytelling...except that it never quite happened.

The first two books did hold my attention and I even felt emotionally invested in the characters (even if they did pale in comparison to the characters populating A Little Life).
Book I takes place in an alternate America in 1893 where New York is part of the Free States where same-sex couples can marry unlike in the Colonies (ie other US states) and gender equality prevails. The story follows David Bingham who lives with his grandfather on Washington Square. The Binghams are a distinguished and wealthy family and David is accustomed to a life of privilege. While his siblings have married and gone on to have families of their own and/or successful careers, David leads a quiet and sedentary life, keeping himself to himself and mostly interacting with his grandfather. One day a week David teaches art in an orphanage/school and it is here that he comes across the new music teacher, Edward Bishop. David falls fast and hard for Edward in spite of his possible arranged union to Charles Griffith, an older gentleman who his grandfather approves of. David knows that his family would never approve of penniless Edward who has little to no social standing. The two nevertheless become romantically involved and David struggles to keep his dalliance a secret. While he does become more aware of the limitations many citizens of the so-called Free States experience, his naive nature remains relatively unchanged. Readers are made aware that this alternate New York is far from idyllic as class and race play a major role in one’s quality of life. David himself, who is white, expresses prejudiced opinions about POC, and, until Edward, was quite unaware of the realities of having to work for one’s living. Over the course of this section characters or the narrative itself will allude to David’s illness, but Yanagihara refrains from delving into specifics. We see what others think of David’s fragility and solitary lifestyle, and the shame that David himself feels because of his illness. The story, like the following ones, has a very slow pacing. Here it kind of works as we are able to grow accustomed to this alternate America and to the various characters, David in particular. The tension of this story is very much created by David’s hidden relationship with Edward. Various events force David to question whether Edward is genuinely in love with him or whether he’s being played like Millie in Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove. The melancholic setting is well-rendered and perfectly complemented Yanagihara’s formal yet piercing prose. Nevertheless, overall I was able to appreciate this section, even if the ending is somewhat abrupt and left me longing for a clearer resolution/conclusion. For some reason, I thought that the later sections would fill in the gaps left by this 1st tale but I’m afraid they did not.
The second section is set in 1993 during the AIDS epidemic. David Bingham, a young Hawaiian man, is a paralegal who becomes involved with one of his firm’s senior partners, Charles. Charles is much older and wealthier than David and this often creates friction in their relationship. Charles’ friends, who, like him are white and older than David, do little to include David, often making jabs at his expenses or insinuating that he’s only after Charles’ money. The power dynamic between Charles and David is decidedly skewed. We also learn of David’s parentage and of the weight he carries because of it. There is quite a lot of ambiguity surrounding his difficult relationship with his father who suffers from an undisclosed illness. The AIDS epidemic also forces David to reconcile himself with his own mortality and the failings of the human body. The drama unfolding between David and Charles was compelling. They have led drastically different lives and move in very different circles. David struggles to adapt to Charles’ lifestyle and no matter how hard he tries he feels alienated from Charles’ set. Throughout the course of book II there are some beautiful meditations on life, death, and love that certainly struck a chord with me. Alas, book II is divided into two parts and only the first one follows David (who is the most likeable David of the lot). Part II is structured as a letter/confession of sorts penned by David’s father. Here we move to Hawaii and we learn more about David’s complicated family history and the eventual dissolution of his family.
Book III, which begins around the 50% mark, is what ruined this book for me. It was a mess. It's 2093 and the world is apparently beset with plagues. We switch to a 1st person narration and our protagonist is living in this generically dystopian New York that is divided into various Zones, some of which have more access to water and food resources. In a move that screams YA dystopia, our female narrator comes across a mysterious man who is dangerously critical of the government. Interspersed throughout her chapters are letters written by her grandfather to one of his closest friends. They provide a blow-by-blow account of the years leading to this dystopian and totalitarian New York and the crucial role he played in it. This part was boring to the extreme. I found that the author’s old-fashioned prose, which really suited Book I & even Book II to be at odds with her dystopian setting. There is also an attempt at mystery by not using the characters’ names (the narrator refers to her grandfather as grandfather and her husband as my husband and this mysterious man as ‘you’). I had no interest in anything that was being said. There were a lot of pandemics, illnesses, plagues, some science lite and I could not bring myself to care for any of it. I kept reading hoping that this Book III would be the bow that ties all of these books together but it never did. We once again have characters sharing the same names but once again the dynamics are slightly different. They do not share the same personality traits as their earlier ‘incarnations’ which left me wondering why did they even have to have the same names to begin with. At one point in Book II David goes on about ‘what ifs’ and parallel universes when thinking about his relationship with Charles.
But that was more or less it. Why do we get the same characters but not really? The many Davids (spoiler: there is more than 3) populating these stories have little in common. They are all male and feel things (to different degrees i might add). Other than that, I didn’t really believe that they were reincarnations of the same David (a la Cloud Atlas). While I was at least able to appreciate the author’s storytelling and themes in the first two books, the last one spoiled things big time. I had to skim read it (something i am not fond of doing). It was a lifeless and unconvincing story narrated by a one-dimensional narrator who sounds like the classic dystopian heroine who has been indoctrinated by whatever evil government. The dystopian setting is stagy, characterised by tired tropes and severely lacking in depth.
I’ll be honest, I did not get the point of this book. Even if I did find book I & II compelling enough, those stories feel ultimately unresolved and lack direction. Book III was a flop.
A Little Life was a tour de force that left me equal parts awestruck and heartbroken. The characters felt real and so did their individual stories. To Paradise instead never fully convinced me. Even the first two books at times came across as affected. And while the themes the author explores in To Paradise have potential, well, she did a much better job with them in A Little Life. Here, both the characters and the relationships they have to one another, well, they are miles behind the ones from A Little Life. Even the 'earlier' Davids struck me as relatively bland and forgettable. The supposed love they feel for their families or partners, well, it didn't convince me much either.
If you are interested in this novel I encourage you check out more positive reviews. Maybe I'm just not the right reader for this type of supposedly interconnected narratives...

To Paradise will likely be one of the most anticipated books of 2022 and those who take the time to immerse themselves will not be disappointed.

The structure of To Paradise is a good place to start a review. In essence the first half is 2 very different novellas and the latter half is a novel in its own right. The 3 strands are bound together by numerous themes, character names (along with some traits which are consistent to that character name) and place (Hawaii and Washington Square, NY).

The first novella is set in a supposed Free States within America in the final years of the 1800s. The son of a banking dynasty struggles to find his place in life and turns down the arranged marriage arranged by his grandfather, in favour of a relationship with the enigmatic but relatively impoverished Edward. It’s a little unclear why there is a Free State and the interplay with other states (things are alluded to but not unpacked) but this allows a great deal of latitude to really explore the characters in a high stakes will they/won’t they plot.

We then move to New York in the midst of the AIDS crisis where a young Hawaiian paralegal lives with an equity partner at the firm where they both work. As well as the 1980s narrative, we are taken back to the young man’s family history, focusing on his father. The historical Hawaiian narrative felt a little odd and clunky compared to the rest of the novel but was enjoyable.

Thereafter we pitch to the future and a New York which has been ravaged by climate change and multiple pandemics, leading to martial law and a society that is significantly less tolerant and amiable than the Free States where we started 200 years earlier. As the world struggles with both a pandemic and climate change it is terrifying. Told over two timelines, we meet a senior scientist and government administrator as he tries to keep his family together in its various guises. For me, it was this second half of the book where I moved from enjoying and appreciating To Paradise to becoming wholly immersed.


Overall an utterly enthralling 4.5*. However it is long. I read the ebook and at about 20 hours reading time, I suspect the real book will be 720 pages of teeny text.

Huge thanks to Pan MacMillan and Netgalley for an ARC.

To Paradise by the incredibly talented Hanya Yanagihara is a very long book. It is basically three books in one. Each could stand alone, but the similarities are interesting, even if not obviously linked. Readers may, like me, find it a bit confusing as the same names are used for different and unrelated characters in different part of the books. Although, having said that, I found myself looking for the familiar names as each story unfolded.
The third, and most substantial part of the book was my favourite by far. The descriptions of a future world where regular pandemic's have changed everything we know was not nearly far enough into the future to not be very disturbing. I loved the character of Charlie, and the use of letters from her grandfather to his British friend Peter was really effective. I don't know if the book was conceived and written before Covid -19, but it is perfect timing to release it. Scary stuff!
I would definitely recommend this to a number of my friends who enjoy beautiful writing and are open minded to dystopian novels. I am certainly glad I read it. I would give it a 4.5 if I could.
Thank you to the author, her publishers and ~NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this emotional and moving book.

This author is fantastic, I couldn't stop read, the book have more than 700 pages and, like the Little Life, not is enough... I want know more, read more this book. Thank so much for this such beautiful book.

There’s a place that we call “The United States of America”. In “To Paradise”, Hanya Yanagihara shows us three versions of that place. These versions are not the USA we know. For example, the book opens in 1893 and we are very quickly aware from the writing style that this is the time period of the narrative. So it is initially a bit confusing to learn that the main character has a brother with a husband and a sister with a wife. Then we learn that America is not a country composed of 50 States but that there are the Free States in the north and the Colonies in the South. It is sort of America, but it is sort of not America. And the same can be said of the Americas that are revealed in books two and three which take place in 1993 and 2093.

This is a big book in every sense of the phrase and I think it will be one of the most talked about literary fiction books of 2022. Firstly, it is over 700 pages long (it took me 9 days to read it, partly because of other commitments but partly because of its length): it could easily have been published as a trilogy because each part is long enough to count as a novel in its own right. But bringing the three parts together in a single volume exposes the huge ambition behind the book. And here I had to turn to the internet and search for interviews with the author to help me start to get to grips with the novel. On the face of it, there isn’t much that connects the three parts in terms of story. There is, however, a multitude of other connections between the three narratives. For example in what can be confusing at times many of the characters share the same names across all three parts. To be clear, these are not the same people in different stories, they are different people in different (but often similar) relationships who happen to have the same names.

When I was about two thirds through this book, I exchanged a few WhatsApp messages with a friend who had just finished it. He shared a quote from the author with me which a quick Google search showed was from an interview at thebookseller.com. Here Yanagihara explains that she began with an interest in writing “about the conception of a what a country really is”. And she goes on to say:

“It was the sense of possibility, of how easily America could have been something else, how easily it could become something else, that I wanted to explore in all three of these books. Because there have been certain moments in America’s creation, certain turning points where the country could have gone another way. So, in that sense [the novel is] not quite speculative and it’s not quite fantasy, but I’m interested in general in these sorts of hinge moments, in either personal history or national history, in which a choice is made that sets you barrelling down one course and a different choice could have meant something profoundly different.

And about the re-use of names across the books, Yanagihara says:

“They are not meant to be the same people across centuries, nor living in the same America,” clarifies Yanagihara. “It was this idea of just taking the country and turning it a half tweak on the dial each time. The people always had different selves, but the names themselves remain; just like the name of America remains for each generation, but America itself is something quite different.”

And so we read first the story of David Bingham whose grandfather wants him to marry the wealthy older man Charles Griffiths whereas David finds himself drawn to a younger man, Edward Bishop. Then we skip 100 years (all the books are set as the centuries begin to draw to a close) to a new David Bingham who is a young Hawaiian man also known as Kawika who is in a relationship with a partner, Charles Griffiths, in the legal firm where they both work. And then to 2093 where the story of a woman called Charlie unfolds, partly revealed to us in a series of letters from Charles Griffiths to a man called Peter. This third book accounts for nearly half of the overall length of the novel and gives us a frightening picture of a world ravaged by pandemics and a country ravaged a government that increasingly controls people’s lives, ostensibly to control spread of disease. Given that Yanigahara conceived the book in 2016 in the lead up to the presidential election in America and researched it in 2017, all long before COVID hit, this book is eerily prescient. As you read, you may want to start a list of connections between the narratives because there are many although none of them relate to the story being told (although at one point someone in the third book hears a story which is basically the story of the first book).

So much for the book. What is it like to read? Firstly, it really does feel like the kind of book that will appear on prize long lists and that will be discussed all over the place (in literary fiction circles, at least) once it is out in the public domain. It’s confusing to read at times because of the name thing but also because of the apparent lack of direct, story telling, connection between the stories in the books. But, at the same time, it echoes ideas all the way through that make you always aware that you are reading a single book even if it is telling you at least 3 different stories. The repeated use of the same names for different characters is both confusing and fun.

As part of the WhatsApp exchange referred to above, my friend asked me how I was finding the book, being careful not to give too much away. And he caught me at a strange moment in the book. The presentation of alternative Americas is initially intriguing but progressively disturbing. And by the time we reach Book 3, the situation seems to be almost exactly the opposite of the America I know from my daily reading of the news. Instead of left wing organisations pushing for restrictions with opposition from those on the right, we have a right wing state apparently using the “cover” provided by a pandemic to push through all kinds of totalitarian measures while those on the left set up opposition groups which are fiercely resisted by the government. This confused me. One possible reading is the book is promoting the ideas/views of the anti-vaxxers/anti-lockdown protesters (“You are right to think the government has a hidden agenda”). Another possibility is that, in some ways, the America Yanagihara presents in Book 3 is an exaggerated version of something that makes more sense than the America we see and maybe the point is that the “real” America today makes little sense: a sort of “fact is stranger than fiction” approach.

Anyway, whatever you think about the different Americas that Yanagihara creates, this is undoubtedly a book to be talked about. At this early stage in its public life, I confess to being unsure how I feel about it. It is very different from both “The People in the Trees” and “A Little Life” and, for me, at least, it does not have the raw emotional power of those books. I’m looking forward to discussing it with other readers when the time comes.