Charles Griffith, a once important government scientist, cares for his granddaughter, Charlie, who has survived a childhood bout of an unnamed virus but has been left severely injured. A new authoritarian government has banned travel, the internet, same-sex marriage and most civil liberties, all in the name of supposedly maximizing the surviving humans' ability to procreate.ĭr. Yanagihara addresses multiple forms of oppression: the colonization of Hawaii and marginalization of the native people, homophobia and discrimination, as well as multiple forms of resistance and resilience.īook Three, 'Zone Eight,' is a suspenseful and terrifying glimpse of a future New York City set amid endless waves of pandemics. Taking place in the mid-20th century, one thread explores how a member of the royal family of Hawaii chooses love over security while his grown son leaves the island to live in New York City with his much older, wealthier lover amid the AIDS crisis.

Channeling both Henry James and Edith Wharton, this section focuses on a man of privilege bridling against the conventions of his era in order to feel real love, perhaps to his peril.īook Two, 'Lipo-Wao-Nahele,' most closely resembles actual U.S. Instead he is drawn to Edward, an impoverished but clever man around his own age. The protagonist, David Bingham, lives in the Free States, roughly equivalent to the Northeastern states today, where same-sex marriage is legal and wealthy white families practice arranged marriage, the better to perpetuate their privilege.īut David cannot quite imagine a future with the elderly, sweet but dull man, Charles Griffith, chosen for him by his grandfather. In Book One, 'Washington Square,' Yanagihara envisions an alternate 19 th-century history for the U.S. The novel is divided into three books, each featuring characters with the same names living in the same house in New York City but in different dystopian eras. 'To Paradise,' Hanya Yanagihara's ambitious follow-up to 'A Little Life,' a National Book Award finalist, is an epic in size and scope.

To paradise yanagihara