To Paradise: Winding road to utopia is riddled with dead ends

Hanya Yanagihara’s ambitious follow-up to A Little Life demands far more from the reader than it gives back

‘The great gay novel’: Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 Booker shortlisted A Little Life has had a resurgence thanks to TikTok

Niamh Donnelly

In its tale of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist convicted of paedophilia, Hanya Yanagihara’s first novel, The People in the Trees, introduced her as a novelist with a gift for the subversive. But it was her second that took the Hawaiian author to a different plane.