Key themes
- Freedom and what people sacrifice for safety
- Three Americas across 150 years — and their different answers to the same question
- Plague, power and the body politic
About this book
Spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, an unforgettable cast of characters are united by their reckonings with the qualities that make us human--fear, love,
Published in 2022, To Paradise is Yanagihara's third novel and her most structurally ambitious. It grew from questions about what freedom means across American history and was written during the pandemic.
Discussion questions
- The novel has three sections set in 1893, 1993 and 2093. Each features characters with the same names in radically different worlds. What is Yanagihara saying through these rhyming narratives — about what persists across history?
- The 2093 section — a totalitarian near-future — is the longest and most demanding. How does this setting complete the novel's argument — and was its placement at the end the right structural choice?
- The title To Paradise asks an implicit question: who gets to go? How does each section answer this differently?
- Yanagihara's prose is rich and extremely detailed. How does this style function differently across the three sections — and is it equally suited to each?
- To Paradise was compared to A Little Life by critics and readers — some finding it even more ambitious. Which do you think is the better novel — and on what basis do you judge this?
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