The premise sounds like a lot, and to be honest with you, it is, but Hanya Yanagihara pulls it off as only she can. In the third and final book (incidentally, my favourite of the three), we enter a kind of dystopian America in 2093, a country under totalitarian law after endless outbreaks of plague which have had a devastating impact on entire generations of society. In the second, set in 1983 during the height of the AIDs epidemic, we meet a young Hawaiin man who lives with his much older, wealthier partner. The first book, set in an alternate version of 1893 New York (an apparent ‘Free State’), follows the love story between a scion of a wealthy family who falls in love with a penniless music teacher. To Paradise is a fin de siècle novel with each book concerning the end of a century and a major turning point in each protagonist’s life. Split into three books, the stories begin slowly before rising to a crescendo, emerging as a symphony.
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