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In Paradise
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  • Published: 8 April 2014
  • ISBN: 9780698164918
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00

In Paradise

A Novel

  • Peter Matthiessen
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A profoundly searching new novel by a writer of incomparable range, power, and achievement.

In the winter of 1996, more than a hundred women and men of diverse nationality, background, and belief gather at the site of a former concentration camp for an unprecedented purpose: a weeklong retreat during which they will offer prayer and witness at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform, while eating and sleeping in the quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews to their deaths. Clements Olin, an American academic of Polish descent, has come along, ostensibly to complete research on the death of a survivor, even as he questions what a non-Jew can contribute to the understanding of so monstrous a catastrophe. As the days pass, tensions, both political and personal, surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to healing or closure. Finding himself in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observer’s role and to embrace a history his family has long suppressed—and with it the yearnings and contradictions of being fully alive.

In Paradise is a brave and deeply thought-provoking novel by one of our most stunningly accomplished writers.
  • Published: 8 April 2014
  • ISBN: 9780698164918
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00
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Praise for In Paradise


"Peter Matthiessen has created a unique body of work. It is the work of a man in ecstatic contemplation of our beautiful and inexplicable planet... we behold a writer of phenomenal scope and versatility."--William Styron in This Quiet Dust and Other Writings

Praise for SHADOW COUNTRY

"Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature... In every way, Shadow Country is a bravura performance, at once history, fiction, and myth--as well as the capstone to a career of one of the most admired and admirable writers of our time."--Michael Dirda, New York Review of Books

"Masterly."--The New York Times

"Magnificent and capacious... a breathtaking saga."--Los Angeles Times

"Shadow Country is a magnum opus. Matthiessen is meticulous in creating characters, lyrical in describing landscapes, and resolute in dissecting the values and costs that accompanied the development of this nation."--Seattle Times

"A great American novel."--Miami Herald

"Gorgeously written and unfailingly compelling, Shadow Country is the exhilarating masterwork of [Matthiessen's] career, every bit as ambitious as Moby Dick."--National Geographic Adventure

"Matthiessen is writing about one man's life in Shadow Country, but he is also writing about the life of the nation over the course of half a century. Watson's story is essentially the story of the American frontier, of the conquering of wild lands and people, and of what such empires cost... Even among a body of work as magnificent as Matthiessen's, this is his great book."--St. Petersburg Times

"A thick porterhous of a novel."--Men's Journal