I started doing research for the pandemic part of the book in 2017. But I'm going to guess that you were at work on this story long before we knew about COVID-19. A novel is enormous and ambitious - more than 700 pages. SIMON: You will understand why we have to ask - particularly about the last section. And one of the things that I was really interested in, especially in the third part of the book, which is a kind of American dystopia, is this idea that no matter how bleak a society is or how totalitarian a regime is or a person's circumstances, one of the things that we all want as humans is affection and love and to find some beauty in our lives.

I mean, it's a story of three different outsiders and three different people who are trying to find love because they want to love and they want to be loved. YANAGIHARA: Well, they are, and they aren't. SIMON: What do you hope readers will see in these separate lives across two centuries? Or are they separate lives? Is that the point? Once I had the structure down and had decided on what I wanted to say, the actual physical act of writing came quite quickly and fluidly. And it felt very intuitive to write these sections of this book. It's a little like when you're doing anything that feels complicated, and if you start overthinking it, then it starts to feel less spontaneous and more labored. YANAGIHARA: Well, you know, you don't think about it too much. These are three eras of exquisite, detailed, intricate interlocking lives all in your head. HANYA YANAGIHARA: Thank you so much for having me, Scott. Hanya Yanagihara, author of the highly acclaimed 'A Little Life' in 2015, joins us now from New York. 'To Paradise' is one of the most highly anticipated novels of 2022. And in 2093, pandemics and storms push the area now known as Zone Eight into an authoritarian society, locking up millions for society's protection. A century later, a descendant of the last monarch of Hawaii lives in the same neighborhood - Greenwich Village - as AIDS ravages a generation, while his heritage is endangered. In The Free States of America, centered in New York of the 1890s, same-sex love and marriage are the norm. Hanya Yanagihara's huge new novel winds through three epics across 200 years and into an alternative world.

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