The bestselling final novel by a writer of incomparable range, power, and achievement, a three-time winner of the National Book Award. Peter Matthiessen was a literary legend, the author of more than thirty acclaimed books. In this, his final novel, he confronts the legacy of evil, and our unquenchable desire to wrest good from it. One week in late autumn of 1996, a group gathers at the site of a former death camp. They offer prayer at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform. They eat and sleep in the sparse quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews in this camp to their deaths. Clements Olin has joined them, in order to complete his research on the strange suicide of a survivor. As the days pass, tensions both political and personal surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to resolution or healing. Caught in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observers role and to bear witness, not only to his familys ambiguous history but to his own. Profoundly thought-provoking, "In Paradise" is a fitting coda to the luminous career of a writer who was "for all readers. He was for the world" ("National Geographic").
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Nacido en Nueva York en 1927, es el único escritor que ha ganado el National Book Award en ficción y en no ficción. Es autor de ocho novelas, entre las que destacan Jugando en los campos del señor (1965; de próxima publicación en Seix Barral), nominada al National Book Award y llevada al cine por Héctor Babenco, y País de sombras (Seix Barral, 2010), galardonada con el National Book Award. Sus cuentos han sido recogidos en el volumen En la laguna Estigia y otros relatos (1989; de próxima publicación en Seix Barral). Luis Buñuel adaptó uno de sus relatos, «Travellin’ Man», en la película La joven (1960). Su carrera como naturalista y activista medioambiental ha dado como resultado numerosas obras de no ficción, entre las que destaca El leopardo de las nieves (1978), galardonada con el National Book Award. Fue cofundador de la Paris Review. Está considerado uno de los mejores escritores norteamericanos vivos: «Uno de los autores más admirados y admirables de nuestra época», The New York Review of Books.