IN PARADISE

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

Clements Olin, American academic of Polish descent, travels to Auschwitz in the winter of 1996 for an extraordinary purpose: a weeklong retreat in which religious groups, the children of prisoners and the children of their guards, hold meditation sessions on the train platforms and sleep in the former SS quarters of the camp where, half a century before, more than a million Jews went to their deaths. As the days pass, tensions political and personal surface among the group, stripping away any easy pretense of healing or closure. Olin, in the grip of emotions of bewildering intensity, is forced to abandon the role of observer and to embrace a history his family has long suppressed. And with it, the yearnings and contradictions of being fully alive. A brave and deeply thought-provoking novel about what it is to bear witness, by one of our most stunningly accomplished writers.

Peter Matthiessen is co-founder of The Paris Review, world-renowned naturalist, explorer, and environmental activist, and the author of thirty books including Shadow Country, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 2008, and The Snow Leopard, which won for non-fiction three decades before.