The People in the Trees

A thrilling anthropological adventure story with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide *from the bestselling author of National Book Award nominated modern classic, *A Little Life

Provokes discussions about science, morality and our obsession with youth. Chicago Tribune

It is 1950 when Norton Perina, a young doctor, embarks on an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a rumored lost tribe. There he encounters a strange group of forest dwellers who appear to have attained a form of immortality that preserves the body but not the mind. Perina uncovers their secret and returns with it to America, where he soon finds great success. But his discovery has come at a terrible cost, not only for the islanders, but for Perina himself.

Look for Hanya Yanagihara s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

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 Souls’ Rising

• “Engrossing.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Richly imagined. . . . Striking and highly satisfying." —The Guardian (London)

“Astonishing. . . . Riveting." —Interview magazine

“Pulses with big ideas. . . . Masterful. . . . [An] audacious, beautifully wrought tragedy." —The Toronto Star

Autorentext

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York.

Klappentext

A powerful work of visionary literary fiction from the bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize and National Book Award-nominated modern classic, A Little Life.

It is 1950 when Norton Perina, a young doctor, embarks on an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a rumored lost tribe. There he encounters a strange group of forest dwellers who appear to have attained a form of immortality that preserves the body but not the mind. Perina uncovers their secret and returns with it to America, where he soon finds great success. But his discovery has come at a terrible cost, not only for the islanders, but for Perina himself. Disquieting yet thrilling, The People in the Trees is an anthropological adventure story with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide.

Zusammenfassung
A thrilling anthropological adventure story with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide—from the bestselling author of National Book Award–nominated modern classic, A Little Life

“Provokes discussions about science, morality and our obsession with youth.” —Chicago Tribune

It is 1950 when Norton Perina, a young doctor, embarks on an expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a rumored lost tribe. There he encounters a strange group of forest dwellers who appear to have attained a form of immortality that preserves the body but not the mind. Perina uncovers their secret and returns with it to America, where he soon finds great success. But his discovery has come at a terrible cost, not only for the islanders, but for Perina himself. 

Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

Leseprobe
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 abandoned in the thicket of a dam someone unknown had built long ago. Minnows, the creek’s year-round inhabitants, fought upstream and drowned. For that one season, the creek had a voice: an outraged roar of rushing water, of power, and that narrow tributary, normally so placid and characterless, became during those months something frightening and unpredictable, and we were warned to keep away.

But in the heat of the summer months, t…