The Border of Paradise, Esme Weijun Wang
The Border of Paradise, Esme Weijun Wang
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

The Border of Paradise

Author: Esmé Weijun Wang

Narrator: Mikael Naramore, Emily Woo Zeller, Graham Halstead, Bailey Carr, Karen Peakes, Andrew Eiden

Unabridged: 12 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/02/2019


Synopsis

A remarkable multigenerational novel, The Border of Paradise transports readers into the world of an iconoclastic midcentury family.In booming postwar Brooklyn, the Nowak Piano Company is an American success story. There is just one problem: the Nowak’s only son, David. A handsome kid and shy like his mother, David struggles with neuroses. If not for his only friend, Marianne, David’s life would be intolerable. When David inherits the piano company at just 18 and Marianne breaks things off, David sells the company and travels around the world. In Taiwan, his life changes when he meets the daughter of a local madame — beautiful, sharp-tongued Daisy. Returning to the United States, the couple (and newborn son) buy an isolated country house in Northern California’s Polk Valley.As David's mental health deteriorates, he has a brief affair with Marianne, producing a daughter. When Marianne appears at their doorstep, the couple's fateful decision to take the child as their own determines a tragic course of events for the entire family. Told from multiple perspectives, The Border of Paradise culminates in heartrending fashion, as the young heirs to the Nowak fortune must confront their past and the tragic reality of their future.

About Esmé Weijun Wang

Esmé Weijun Wang is the author of The Border of Paradise. She received the Whiting Award in 2018 and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2017. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in San Francisco.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Rene on October 13, 2018

How can I have not read this book yet? It's astonishing. There are reviews that call it disturbing, but that's not my take. But then...look at my life, lol. There's a discussion to be had around what privileged society has decided isn't disturbing, and those books tend to be troubling for their deni......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on June 09, 2017

This dark and disturbing book examines the way that mental illness can impact an entire family. It starts with David, a neurotic young boy who inherits his family fortune. As a young adult, David travels to Taiwan and meets a woman at a brothel whom he marries and takes back to America to start a fam......more

Goodreads review by Richard Finkelson on February 15, 2017

I don't know what to say about a book with which I had zero connection. Aesthetics aside, I found most of the characters two dimensional - David, whose psychosis is his defining feature; Daisy - who is equally insane regarding the imposed seclusion of her children; and the children themselves who ar......more