The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara - Literary Fiction - Paperback Debut Novel

Condition: BRAND NEW. Format: Paperback. ISBN: 9781509892983. Publisher: Picador. Age Range: Adult. Overview:. The People in the Trees is Hanya Yanagihara's astonishing debut, a literary work fusing adventure, science and moral reckoning. Set largely in 1950, it follows Dr Norton Perina, a young doctor who journeys to a remote Micronesian island and stumbles upon a hidden tribe seemingly untouched by time. Told as a fictional memoir, the novel is a slow-burning exploration of ambition and consequence, essential reading for admirers of Yanagihara's later work.. About the Book:. Long before Hanya Yanagihara became a literary sensation, she announced herself with this audacious, unnerving debut. Narrated largely through the memoirs of disgraced Nobel laureate Dr Norton Perina, the novel recounts his 1950 expedition to the fictional Micronesian island of Ivu'ivu, where a small anthropological team hears rumours of a lost tribe said to have achieved something close to immortality. What Perina finds among the island's forest dwellers - people who live for centuries but lose their minds along the way - sets in motion a discovery that will make him famous, wealthy and, ultimately, notorious. Framed by his former colleague and editor, the narrative gradually reveals the darker cost of Perina's ambition, both to the islanders whose culture he disturbs and to the children he later adopts. Yanagihara's prose is dense, meticulous and unsettling, building a portrait of a brilliant but morally compromised man whose triumph curdles into catastrophe. The novel interrogates the ethics of Western scientific exploration, the exploitation of indigenous communities, and the corrupting pull of a discovery too significant to walk away from. It is by turns an adventure story, a character study and a slow-building horror, refusing easy answers about culpability. Fans of Yanagihara's later novel A Little Life will recognise the same unflinching interest in trauma and self-justification, deliv