books

The Author of A Little Life Finally Has a New Book Coming

Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; Photo by Publisher

Hanya Yanagihara’s next novel, To Paradise, will be published by Doubleday on January 11, 2022. The author’s last title, A Little Life, won the 2015 Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for both the Booker Prize and National Book Award. Her new book spans three different centuries and versions of America: 1893, when New York is part of the “Free States”; 1993, when Manhattan was besieged by the AIDS epidemic; and 2093, when the world faces plagues and totalitarian rule. According to a release, To Paradise explores the way humans long to find a place in an earthly paradise and gradually realize that it can’t exist. The cast of characters includes a fragile descendant of a distinguished family who prefers a poor music teacher over the suitor seeking their hand in marriage, a young Hawaiian man who is keeping secrets about himself and his father from his older and wealthier partner, and a woman who is learning to live without her powerful scientist grandfather while trying to make sense of her husband’s mysterious disappearances. “That the novel has such scope and range and ambition, yet feels so intimate, is a testament to Hanya Yanagihara’s capacious mind, imagination, and heart,” Doubleday’s publisher and editor-in-chief Bill Thomas said in a statement. Perhaps the new book, like A Little Life, will get bids for a potential TV adaptation? Either way, we bet Antoni Porowski will be reading.

The Author of A Little Life Finally Has a New Book Coming