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This book is that rare balance between character-driven academic literature and page-turning fiction. The plot is difficult to describe. The narrator is a scientist named Dr. Norton Perina who "discovers" a group of people on a remote island who have never had contact with the outside world. Perina is an intelligent man, but he's also pathologically narcissistic, and as he tries to investigate certain mysteries surrounding these people, he slowly destroys their culture. The end is shocking and grim--not for the faint of heart. The fact that this is Yanagihara's debut novel is simply astounding. Her follow-up novel, "A Little Life," is also a masterpiece.
HPB Staff ReviewIn Hanya Yanagihara's first novel, she explores the many complex relationships of man: human to human; human to the environment; and human to self, the deepest mystery of all. The story takes place in a fictional South Pacific nation made up of three pristine islands. As the story begins, the island-states are pure and free of the trappings of modern culture; the people on these islands live as they have been for thousands of years. Dr. A. Norton Perina is fresh out of medical school when he is asked to accompany a noted Stanford anthropologist as he explores one of these islands for signs of a mysterious and unknown race of people. The journey sets off a remarkable series of events that eventually change the world, and, to an even greater extent, the course of Dr. Perina's life forever. Told with exquisite skill and compassion, The People in the Trees invites the reader along on a journey that is beautiful, repulsive, enlightening and impossible to describe. This book is highly recommended to any reader who may have loved Yanagihara's most recent novel A Little Life, or to anyone who wishes to take a journey into a wild, untamed environment. Beware, though: you will come back irreversibly changed.
HPB Staff Review