The People in the Trees

I.

I was born in 1924 near Lindon, Indiana, the sort of small, unremarkable rural town that some twenty years before my birth had begun to duplicate itself, quietly but insistently, across the Midwest. By which I mean that the town, as I remember it, was exceptional only for its very lack of distinguishing details. There were silos, and red barns (most of the residents were farmers), and general stores, and churches, and ministers and doctors and teachers and men and women and children: an outline for an American society, but one with no flourishes, no decoration, no accessories. There were a few drunks, and a resident madman, and dogs and cats, and a county fair that was held in tandem with Locust, an incorporated town a few miles to the west that no longer exists. The townspeople--there were eighteen hundred of us--were born, and went to school, and did chores, and became farmers, and married Lindonites, and began families of their own. When you saw someone in the street, you d nod to him or, if you were a man, pull down the brim of your hat a bit. The seasons changed, the tobacco and corn grew and were harvested. That was Lindon.

There were four of us in the family: my father, my mother, and Owen and me. (1) We lived on a hundred acres of land, in a sagging house whose only notable characteristic was a massive, once-grand central staircase that long before had been transformed by generations of termites into a lacy ruin.

About a mile behind the house ran a curvy creek, too small and slow and behaviorally inconsistent to warrant a proper name. Every March and April, after the winter thaw, it would surpass its limitations and become a proper river, swollen and aggressive with gallons of melted snow and spring rain. During those months, the creek s very nature changed. It became merciless and purposeful, and seized from its outgrown banks tiny, starry bloodroot blossoms and wild thyme by their roots and whisked them downstream, where they were

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York.

One of the Best Books of the Year: Chicago Tribune San Francisco Chronicle The Wall Street Journal  Publishers Weekly  Huffington Post  Cosmopolitan

Exhaustingly inventive and almost defiant in its refusal to offer redemption or solace. . . . As for Yanagihara, she is a writer to marvel at. The New York Times Book Review

A mystery story, an ecological parable, a monstrous confession, and a fascinating consideration of moral relativism. . . . A triumph of the imagination."  Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize winning author of All the Light We Cannot See

Haunting. . . . A standout novel . . . thrilling. The Wall Street Journal

Fascinating and multilayered. . . . [Yanagihara s] storytelling is masterful. . . . Hugely ambitious and entertaining. The Boston Globe

A deeply satisfying adventure story. . . . Provokes discussions about science, morality and our obsession with youth. Chicago Tribune

Hauntingly strange and utterly convincing. . . .  A novel you will finish and immediately want to read again; a complex, elegant and wonderfully troubling debut. Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet

Feels like a National Geographic story by way of Conrad s Heart of Darkness. . . . The world Yanagihara conjures up, full of dark pockets of mystery, is magical."  The Times (London)

An engrossing, beautifully detailed, at times amazing (and shocking) novel." Paul Theroux, author of The Lower River and The Great Railway Bazaar
 

By turns brilliant, provocative and profoundly sobering. Independent on Sunday (London)

Captivating and thoroughly unsettling."  Vogue

Impossible to resist. . . . Packed with a symphony of complex themes made accessible by the sheer poetry of [Yanagihara s] prose. . . . [A] brilliantly told story."  The Daily Mail (London)

A Nabokovian phantasmagoria. . . . Hanya Yanagihara is a writer to watch. Madison Smartt Bell, author of The Color of Night and All