Four young women are brutally attacked in a convent near an all-Black town in America in the mid-1970s. The inevitability of this attack, and the attempts to avert it, lie at the heart of Paradise. Spanning the birth of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the counterculture, and the politics of the late 1970s, the novel deftly manipulates past, present, and future to reveal the interior lives of the town’s citizens with astonishing clarity.

Starkly evoking the clashes that have troubled the American century between race and racelessness, religion and magic, promiscuity and fidelity, individuality and belonging Paradise is by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved.