In Paradise

A Novel

By: Peter Matthiessen

Narrated by: Mark Bramhall

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.

Thought-provokingly good

Good story - descriptive and interesting. characters from all different backgrounds, each shining a light (sometimes dim, sometimes bright) onto The Holocaust - what it meant then and what it means now. How each person's life experience colors their reasons for gathering at Auschwitz and their reactions as the week progresses.

Great narration - the characters are from different countries, classes, backgrounds and the narrator successfully navigates each one.

I give this book five stars because it is truly an

Matthiessen is the Master who paints with words and reveals an aspect of life that others
only experience when their eyes absorb that gulp of truth so clearly their heart will never be the same .

It is the story of a 1996 gathering of people at Auschwitz. They had come together to pry, meditate,
and contemplate on a deep lever the horrors that had transpired in this place.

Intensely thought provoking

One of my favorite writers over the last almost 50 years his unique command of the English language is comparable to Hemmingway yet with a depth of experience that brings reality to his novels and readability to his non-fiction an incredible man who lived an incredible life and it is a privilege to read or listen to his work