Hanya Yanagihara's follow-up to A Little Life tells three loosely connected stories set in alternate versions of New York -- 1893, 1993, and 2093 -- each imagining a different version of America and a different shape of love and crisis. The New York Times Book Review called the result extraordinary. NPR called it a puzzle that doesn't quite come together. This review takes both seriously, alongside the actual Goodreads numbers behind a genuinely polarizing book.
What the Book Actually Is
Structured as three separate, loosely linked novellas rather than one continuous narrative, the book reimagines 1890s New York as part of a same-sex-marriage-accepting alternate Free States, follows a 1990s AIDS-era story of a father and son, and closes with a 2090s pandemic-ravaged authoritarian future. Characters' names recur across the sections without the sections being directly connected in plot.
About Hanya Yanagihara and Why She Wrote This
Hanya Yanagihara was born in 1974 and grew up largely in Hawaii before attending Smith College. After graduating, she moved to New York and spent years working as a publicist before becoming a writer and editor, eventually rising to editor-in-chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her first novel, The People in the Trees, published in 2013 and partly inspired by the real-life case of virologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, was named one of the best books of that year. Her second novel, A Little Life, became a major bestseller and was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in 2015. Yanagihara has said the specific idea for To Paradise crystallized shortly after the announcement of the 2017 US travel ban commonly called the Muslim ban; the news pushed her to start thinking seriously about the idea of America as a mythical paradise, and to ask whether that founding promise had been false from the start. That question, rather than a single plot, became the thread she used to link three otherwise separate stories a century apart.
What Critics Actually Said
The New York Times Book Review wrote that 'with breathtaking audacity Yanagihara rewrites America,' calling the result 'confounding, brilliant, intricate, beautiful, horrific' and, ultimately, 'an extraordinary book.' The Atlantic called it 'an astonishing and ambitious chronicle of queer life in America.' Like Yanagihara's earlier A Little Life, the novel also drew polarized reactions to its handling of extended suffering as a narrative device.
Where Real Reviews Pushed Back
NPR's review was direct: it described the novel as 'an inspired and vivid puzzle that doesn't quite come together.' Other critics have been more pointed, with one writing that 'To Paradise is Yanagihara's most ambitious novel to date and, to my mind, her least successful,' specifically citing the structural problem that the book is 'two novellas and a full-length novel that truly do not make a cohesive whole.' This is a consistent, sourced criticism across multiple outlets, not an isolated complaint.
The Book's Three Americas, in Brief
Part one is set in 1893 in an alternate United States where a group of Free States, including New York, permit same-sex marriage; David Bingham, heir to a Washington Square fortune, is pushed by his grandfather toward a secure marriage to an older, wealthy man even as he's drawn instead to a poorer, more precarious music teacher. Part two jumps to 1993, during the AIDS crisis, and follows a father and son navigating inherited wealth, illness, and a strained relationship set against Hawaii's colonial history and New York's epidemic. Part three lands in 2093, in a totalitarian New York City reshaped by decades of recurring pandemics, where a woman named Charlie tries to piece together what's actually happened to her missing husband inside a surveillance state built, in part, to contain outbreaks like the ones the book's earlier sections foreshadow.
What Actually Links the Three Timelines
The book deliberately withholds a direct plot connection between its three parts -- character names recur (a David, a Charles, a Nathaniel) but they aren't the same people across centuries, and reviewers have framed the design as an intentional puzzle rather than a lapse. What links the sections, per Yanagihara's own framing, is thematic rather than genealogical: each version of America promises a kind of paradise, whether personal freedom, family safety, or protection from disease, and each one, in its own way, fails to deliver it, or delivers it only at a steep cost to someone else. Recurring elements -- a Washington Square townhouse, inherited illness, the gap between wealth and squalor, the danger of righteous conviction whether held by the powerful or by revolutionaries -- are the real connective tissue, not plot.
On Illness, Suffering, and Yanagihara's Recurring Preoccupations
Readers of A Little Life will recognize a familiar Yanagihara move here: illness and extended suffering aren't incidental to these characters, they're central to how the book explores intimacy, dependency, and care. The 1993 section sits directly inside the AIDS crisis; the 2093 section imagines pandemic after pandemic reshaping an entire society's relationship to freedom and control. That throughline is also where the novel's biggest split in critical opinion shows up: the same intensity that made A Little Life a widely beloved, widely debated book resurfaces here, and reviewers who found the earlier novel's suffering purposeful tend to read To Paradise the same way, while reviewers who found it excessive raise similar objections to this book's darker later sections.
Key Takeaways
- To Paradise tells three formally separate stories set in 1893, 1993, and 2093 New York, linked by theme rather than direct plot or family lineage
- Yanagihara has said the idea crystallized after the 2017 US travel ban, when she began questioning whether America's promise of itself as a paradise had ever been true
- The New York Times and The Atlantic praised the novel's ambition and audacity, while NPR and other critics specifically flagged its lack of structural cohesion
- Each of the three sections reworks the same core tension: what a paradise, personal, political, or medical, actually costs the people who don't get to have it
- The novel continues concerns from Yanagihara's earlier A Little Life, particularly its sustained focus on illness and suffering as central to how intimacy and care get portrayed
Who This Book Is Actually For
Readers who want ambitious, formally experimental literary fiction and are comfortable with loosely connected, structurally unconventional narratives rather than a single unified plot.
Who Should Read Something Else Instead
If you want a tightly unified single narrative rather than three loosely linked stories that don't fully resolve into one whole, the sourced NPR and other critiques about structural cohesion are a fair warning.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- New York Times Book Review called it 'an extraordinary book' with 'breathtaking audacity'
- The Atlantic praised it as 'an astonishing and ambitious chronicle of queer life in America'
- Genuinely ambitious three-part structure spanning alternate versions of 1893, 1993, and 2093 New York
- Solid 3.74 out of 5 rating across more than 40,000 Goodreads ratings for the hardcover edition
- Rewards readers interested in formally experimental, structurally unconventional literary fiction
Cons:
- NPR specifically described it as a puzzle that 'doesn't quite come together'
- Multiple critics flag the three sections as feeling more like separate works than a cohesive whole
- One reviewer called it Yanagihara's 'least successful' novel despite acknowledging its ambition
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this a sequel to A Little Life?
No -- it's a separate novel, though it shares Yanagihara's interest in extended suffering as a narrative device, which some readers find polarizing across both books.
What's the actual Goodreads rating?
3.74 out of 5 for the hardcover edition from roughly 40,000 ratings as of this writing.
Are the three parts connected?
Loosely -- character names and some themes recur across the three sections, but they aren't directly connected in plot, which is the specific structural criticism multiple reviewers raise.
What did major reviews say overall?
Mixed but substantive -- The New York Times and The Atlantic praised it highly, while NPR and other reviewers specifically critiqued its lack of structural cohesion.
Sources & Further Reading
- Goodreads -- To Paradise (aggregate rating, reader reviews)
- The New York Times Book Review
- The Atlantic
- NPR
- PositiveLifes.com — free inspirational and life-changing PDF books
Final Verdict
To Paradise earned real, sourced praise from The New York Times and The Atlantic for its audacity and ambition, alongside equally real, sourced criticism from NPR and others about whether its three parts actually cohere into one novel. Both are accurate readings of a genuinely polarizing book. If you want formally ambitious literary fiction and don't need three linked stories to resolve into a single unified whole, it's worth the investment.
Buy Day rating: 7.6/10