Nathaniel reaches out to a marriage broker in order to ensure David will always have someone to care for him. It has also meant that David is the most isolated member of his family, and the only one as yet not married.

David suffers from a mysterious recurring illness which has meant that his family have always treated him as fragile. In this first section, called ‘Washington Square’ for the grand townhouse where much of the action takes place, we follow David Bingham, one of three Bingham siblings set to inherit portions of a vast estate from their grandfather Nathaniel. Outside of the Free States, homosexuality is still illegal. The schism between states appears to largely be based on the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and around half of the characters in this section (and more than half of those in the book’s entirety) are part of same sex marriages. The United States is divided and New York is part of the Free States. This time, she imagines a counterfactual history which begins in a Henry Jamesian 1893.

Spanning three interlinked novellas each set 100 years apart, To Paradise is a book about family, obligation, tradition and – as you may already know– illness.įollowing on from the critical and commercial success of her Booker Prize shortlisted sophomore novel, A Little Life, Yanagihara has also once again chosen to explore the lives of queer characters, specifically men in same sex relationships. That it has taken me until now to finish it says as much about its length (some 700 plus pages) as it does about its subject matter. To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara’s third novel, was released in January 2022.

Yanagihara to paradise review