A thoughtful and emotional book and a very hard thing to follow up to A Little Life but I really enjoyed this one! Thank you netgalley for the review copy!

I love Hanya Yanagihara, and although this one took me a long time to get through I loved it all the same

A Little Life is easily one of my favourite books of all time. And so I really, really wanted to love To Paradise just as much. I felt very let down, as although the writing is absolutely beautiful (of course it is!), I just didn't feel enough of a connection to the characters as I wanted to. Part 3 was definitely the saviour of this book for me and I did find some emotional connection to the characters, but it just felt too little too late. Breaks my heart to have to give this 3 stars but I needed that connection and it wasn't there for me.

I had high hopes for this after loving (is that the right word for something so miserable?) A Little Life, however this book was such a painful slog to get through that I gave up about a third of the way in. A rare DNF.

I started this book and I’m afraid to say I didn’t love it. I loved a little life by this author so I was excited about this one. It really confused me and I just didn’t connect with the story

Hanya Yanagihara’s writing is superb – lyrical and mesmerising – and I found parts of this epic book utterly absorbing. I also loved how the language changed according to the era. To Paradise is divided into three parts, all of which are linked and explore similar themes. I was totally hooked by the first part, about wealthy gentleman, David Bingham, who lives with his grandfather in Washington Square towards the end of the 19th century. David has a marriage arranged for him, but instead falls for a much more attractive, if forbidden, young man, Edward Bishop, who rouses in him “his full capacity for pleasure”. Hanya really understands the human condition, and her characters, in this first part of the book, were alive and real and really leapt off the pages. I was firmly on the side of the slightly inept and not particularly socially mature David, and desperately wanted him to find acceptance and love.
This wasn’t as true for me in the second part, set in the present. I battled to engage with the characters, or truly understand them. I found the third part, set in the future, fascinating, and again, enjoyed the multitude of characters and the world they inhabited. I also felt an increasing sense of dread throughout this part, concerned as it was with global pandemics, and the control exerted by those in power.
All in all, I found To Paradise a bit long, and I did find that some parts of books 11 and 111 dragged for me. I found myself plodding through them to see what would happen next. I would have been very content with Part 1 as a book on its own – but I can see the literati shaking their heads in scorn, as I do realise that this simply would’ve missed the point.

Really enjoyed this in a totally different way to A Little Life, the subject matter is less harrowing but the wonderful writing and deep descriptive texts remain. Wonderful.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an Arc in exchange for an honest review.

A sprawling ambitious novel containing three books. The first opens in a grand townhouse in Washington Square in an homage to the Henry James novel of the same name. But whilst the storyline is similar, a wealthy heir is vulnerable to a fortune seeker, this is an alternate history of North America. Instead of the United States, there are the Free States, a smaller collection of states where same sex relationships and marriages are on an equal footing to heterosexual couplings. Despite this equality there are still divisions in society, in particular wealth and those with refugee status. Book two is based between the same Washington Square House but in the 1980s amidst the Aids epidemic and Hawaii where an Hawaiin royal with no kingdom sinks into powerlessness as he confronts the legacy of colonialism. The third book, and the longest part, brings us to the near future. The house in Washington Square is now separated into apartments, beginning in the 2040s a dystopian America ravaged by pandemics is slowly revealed. Same sex relationships are now illegal and refugees are still treated abhorrently. Scientists are carefully controlled and conspiracy theories abound that the government is infecting its citizens and creating pandemics to control its citizens.

It's a novel that asks the same questions repeatedly yet frustratingly it provides very few answers to these thematic questions. Indeed even the story of the characters is never resolved and each ends with going on either to paradise or a worst version of what they are escaping, to highlight this in Book 3 a streetside storyteller repeats the story for book one but an interruption comes before we can find out the conclusion for our book one character. The author is knowingly taunting us that she doesn’t care about our satisfaction and it seems like the questions are haphazardly put to us with little care about the answers.

Why should authors provide big answers to questions? We as readers will either read our own conclusions to the novel or indeed reject it vehemently. Whilst I can concede this I do think writers in the past have added to our understanding of the world which is one of reasons reading is such a rewarding experience. With this book it feels as little has been added and that it is a rather unsubstantial reading experience.

The irony of this book is that all three books whilst having common themes,names and places actually felt very unconnected.

I was blown away by this book - particularly part 3. The first two parts I found rather slow moving, and wondered where it was all going; these are more like painted scenes, a sliver of someone's life, and we are left without a real and satisfying conclusion in any of the stories. I've been going on about book 3 to friends and other book people since I finished it - the presentation of a world ravaged by pandemics and climate change is rather close to home, but the revelation that not everywhere is dystopian gives us grounds for hope.

I wondered whether the third book would stand alone, but I don't think so. I think it's like a symphony - you might not like all the movements, but you can't just skip to the bits you like best, they lose their power if you don't have the build up and the foundation of the other bits.

Wasn’t for me at this time but I will try and pick it up again in the future.

I couldn’t get into it and found that it just didn’t hold my attention. I think maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood for it which is why I have put it aside for now.

A Little Life is one of my favourite all time reads and maybe that is why I didn't enjoy this as much as i thought i would , maybe i had too high expectations ?? I didn't love it, I didn't dislike it but for me it just remains in the middle .
There's no doubt that our author can write , maybe one of the best writers of this generation and I think this is what kept me reading as i do love her prose but....... it was all just too disjointed and i was left thinking what was the point in 3 completely different stories with the same character names but no coherent plotline. Yes the same sort of issues are subtly raised in each story, privilege, race , socioeconomic problems but there is no obvious link. . The book is far too long and it's easy to see why some gave up .
I will certainly continue to read her work but this sadly won't be in my favourite reads of the year.

I loved A Little Life and I had high hopes for this novel. The first third was incredible, but I struggled after that and ultimately gave up. Too long and, at times, I wondered what the point of it was.

I will always devour anything and everything that Yanagihara writes. To Paradise had a lot to live up to, in my expectations, following my reading of A Little Life, and while it could never come close to A Little Life, for me anyway it did not let me down.

A wide-reaching novel, spanning 100 years, that once again draws on themes of family, love and immense pain.

I won't give too much away for those that haven't had the chance to read it yet. But once again, those prose in this novel is stunning and I would definitely recommend1

I do not know why I finished this book. It might have been the author’s skill in writing a story, but the story’s content did not hold me the way I hoped it would.
It is a tome of a book, or at least felt that way. It is the primary reason for my not enjoying the experience. If I had spent a little less time working my way through the book, I would have been more lenient and appreciative of the plotlines.
The first thing that I am sure most people will notice in reviews of this book is the fact that it is a three-part story. I usually like such a plot, but in this case, there was almost no connection between the parts, except for the name and maybe the fact that they were related. This made the entire book feel very odd, to say the least. The names of the central characters were repeated, causing me a lot of confusion. In the best of times, I find it hard to retain who was who based on names (I focus more on individual characteristics); here, I was perplexed and almost gave up a couple of times.
It is a story of a utopia or dystopia (based on perception) in the past, the immediate future and a few hundreds of years beyond that. The prominent men in all the chapters had the same names, but their roles changed. Each situation was different, and the society was as well. The US and its relationship with Hawaii were also mentioned in every section.
There are a lot of topics that start but do not go anywhere.
I will iterate that I thought the author has skill in writing, which is why I persisted and saw it through to the end, hoping to reveal the thread that connected them all and therefore satisfying my curiosity. The ending of the last section is when I decided that I could not truthfully claim to have liked the book. All the misdirections in the different events, I could still say, were good talking points, but after all that, leaving the ending as a cliffhanger was something I could not stomach.
I would not recommend this particular book to anyone I know, but I would recommend the author!
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

Her Booker Prize-nominated novel A Little Life left readers staggering under the weight of suffering endured by its lead character Jude. Now writer Hanya Yanagihara is back with another sprawling novel, again with love and pain at its core. This complex work is actually three novels in one, each set a 100 years apart and all revolving loosely around the same house and family in New York.
The first part, Washington Square, is set in the 1890s in an alternative New York where gay love is actively celebrated. Its hero is David, a troubled young man from a wealthy family who is set up to marry the kind but staid Charles Griffiths, but who falls for a scurrilous school teacher, Edward. Their intense love affair threatens to scupper his chance at inheritance and respectability among the city’s elite.
In part two, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, we are back in New York in the 1980s where a new illness is striking down men. Here we meet another David Bingham, a sensitive paralegal who lives with his much older boss, the urbane Charles Griffiths. David is harbouring a secret: he is in fact Hawaiian royalty, but thanks to US colonialism, David’s throne longer exists.
Part three, Zone Eight, is set in a repressive dystopian future in which Charlie, a damaged and emotionally stunted survivor of a pandemic, tries to find her missing husband. Her best interests are the central preoccupation of her loving grandfather, Charles Griffith, a powerful government scientist who soon finds himself in danger.
Yanagihara’s ambitious masterpiece is concerned with big themes – freedom, sexuality, power and privilege – but she is at her brilliant best when tunnelling deep into the human condition and the price we pay for love. This 700-page brick of a book was daunting to embark on but I really didn’t want it to end.

Honestly, I was so very ready to love this book, and yes Hanya’s compelling writing style is still present, but the stories themselves were like three separate books were started in lockdown and non were finished.

Oh boy.

Okay, so I should preface this review by saying I bloody loved A Little Life. It broke me in ways I didn’t know I could be broken and I would read it all again even though that broken hearted feeling would get me again. Therefore, I was both excited and terrified of reading To Paradise - Hanya Yanagihara's latest release. I tried to not compare it to A Little Life and tried to go into it with the knowledge that I just liked the writers style and I swear I gave it a good college try. I read up to 51% of the novel before having to admit defeat. I just couldn’t finish it.

I loved the first part of the story, the arranged marriage between the two main characters and if the story carried on being about them I think I could have carried on with the novel - although at 720 pages it probably was a bit too long - but then the story switched. It took me a while to get my bearings with the second section and whilst I didn't fin the story as engaging as I did the first I really wanted to try and keep going. However, when the third storyline hit and it was set in space I had to tap out. I just stopped caring for the characters and the story.

So unfortunately To Paradise was a DNF but not without lack of trying.

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara is available now.

For more information regarding Hanya Yanagihara (@YanagiharaHanya) please visit her Twitter page.

For more information regarding Pan Macmillan (@panmacmillan) please visit www.panmacmillan.com.

This is so beautifully written and each story stayed with me after I'd finished. But it really felt like three different books. Each book is wonderful but taken together they were a little too much. I wish I'd read one, moved onto another author's book, then come back and read each of the others. That way I would have appreciated each one more.

I haven’t read Hanya Yanagihara before but if her writing is as strong as it is in To paradise I’m going to love her other novels. This is a novel separated into three very different stories set in different time periods and what it showed was how talented the author is in her storytelling, writing and characterisation. It’s one of those books that will be even more powerful on rereads as you see even more connections and layers within the storytelling. Can’t wait to read Hanya Yanagihara’s backlist and see what else is to come from her.

While I loved A LITTLE LIFE up to a point (if you know, you know), it's a very difficult book to get out of your head. Years later, I still haven't read anything with quite the surreal immersion that A LITTLE LIFE put me into as I read its hundreds of pages.

Sadly, TO PARADISE didn't work for me in the same way. While equal in scope, and certainly more ambitious, flaws of Yanagihara's writing that I was willing to ignore in A LITTLE LIFE were harder to do in this novel. She cannot seem to separate gay men from tragedy -- though gay men of the Aids generation and the one that followed are well aware of their tragic history, and the loss of wisdom and experience that impacts the queer community even now -- and female characters are notably absent in this book, or their inclusion simply to further along the male narrative.

The premise had such potential, and I was disappointed at how this one didn't hit the mark for me, but following up A LITTLE LIFE was always going to be a mammoth task.