In the first section we’re in 1893, at the heart of fin-de-siècle society with clear Jamesian resonances (it centres on a big family house in Washington Square), except that this New York is a breakaway republic where same-sex marriage is the norm. “It’s a mature masterpiece, which makes A Little Life look overcaffeinated,” says veteran novelist Edmund White, who emerged as an early champion with a Facebook post that To Paradise was “as good as War and Peace”.Īt the Cheltenham literary festival in 2015 with fellow Man Booker shortlisted authors Marlon James and Sunjeev Sahota. It is, however, most definitely worth hanging on in. There’s perhaps another motive behind Yanagihara’s note to the booksellers: until you get the hang of it, which takes the length of an ordinary-sized novel, it’s all a bit disorientating, not least because – for reasons to do with its preoccupation with inherited privilege – the protagonists in all three timezones are all named David, Edward and Charles/Charlie Bingham. This is a very different city, which is seen in three different iterations in a trio of time zones. Like its predecessor, To Paradise is a brick of a book that checks in at well over 700 pages and is set largely in New York. We’re often renaming things in the US, to eradicate a bad memory or to dissociate from a person history has not treated kindly “Do you remember where you were when you finished A Little Life? And where were you when you heard that Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel arrives next year? Right here,” tweeted Waterstones at the time – an enthusiasm rewarded by Yanagihara in proof copies of To Paradise, with a personal note of thanks to all the booksellers who had pressed her work into readers’ hands. She is determined not to let her mystery ailment get in the way of a promotional campaign that began six months earlier when news of To Paradise was teased to the book trade. Usually it’s a cold or flu, so this is a new one for me,” she says, brandishing hands flushed with tiny red spots. “I do New York, Milan and Paris, and I always end up getting sick. The jaunt is a twice-yearly ritual: menswear and furniture shows the spring and summer, then women’s ready-to-wear in the autumn. When we meet up, at an upmarket London hotel in October, she is combining a whistlestop publicity trip for her third novel, To Paradise, with two weeks of European fashion shows that have left her with “a mysterious illness” which, she hastens to add, is definitely not Covid. But far from giving up her day job, Yanagihara took on a bigger one, as editor-in-chief of T, the New York Times style magazine. A Little Life sold a quarter of a million print copies in the UK alone, where it was shortlisted for the Booker and the Women’s prize for fiction. Victoria Beckham and Dua Lipa declared themselves fans, while an equally passionate group of readers condemned it as gratuitous, even “evil”. It was about the fallout, among four college friends, from the appalling childhood sexual abuse of one of their group, and it hit the jackpot, becoming one of those vanishingly rare literary break-outs. Two years later, the Manhattan-based writer released a novel that was twice as long and even less forgiving. It impressed reviewers with its exhaustive inventiveness and its refusal to offer redemption or solace, but sold only a few thousand copies when it was published in 2013. The People in the Trees was the story of a scientist jailed for sexually abusing children he adopted during his Nobel-winning research on a Pacific island. H anya Yanagihara’s debut novel taught her not to give up her day job as a travel writer and editor.
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