Digital List Price:	$15.99
Kindle Price:	$9.87 Save $6.12 (38%)
Sold by:	Amazon.com Services LLC

Promotions apply when you purchase

Add an

audiobook with Audible narration for $7.49

Audiobook Price: $21.88

Save: $14.39 (66%)

Read with our free app

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Follow the author

Esmé Weijun Wang

+ Follow

More books from this author

The Border of Paradise: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Esmé Weijun Wang (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 265 ratings

See all formats and editions

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 the sharp-tongued, intelligent 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 health deteriorates, he has a brief affair with Marianne, producing a daughter.

It’s Daisy's solution for the future of her two children, inspired by the old Chinese tradition of raising girls as sisterly wives for adoptive brothers, that exposes Daisy’s traumatic life, and the terrible inheritance her children must receive. Framed by two suicide attempts, The Border of Paradise is told from multiple perspectives, culminating in heartrending fashion as the young heirs to the Nowak fortune confront their past and their isolation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Border of Paradise is shaped by darkness and the kind of delicious story that makes for missed train stops and bedtimes, keeping a reader up late for just one more page of dynamic character-bouncing perspective (an idea which came to Wang in dreams). It is the author’s stunning introduction to the literary world." —Alli Maloney, The New York Times

"Wang's prose is beautiful and restrained, and her generous, precise characterization makes every perspective feel organic and utterly real in the face of increasingly theatrical circumstances. The result the story of an American family stretched and manipulated into impossible shapes is an extraordinary literary and gothic novel of the highest order." —Carmen Maria Machado, NPR

"Gothic in tone, epic in ambition, and creepy in spades." Kirkus Reviews

One of Library Journal's picks for Top Spring Indie Fiction:

"A well-wrought multigenerational novel that also appeals for its honest look at mental illness." Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

One of the Lit Hub's Books to Read in April:

"Wang takes Ahab’s rant of 'madness maddened' and infuses it through all of the characters in this book, not just the ones who are identified as crazy. A terrifying look at dysfunction, manipulation, and psychological torture and love, yes love. A very deftly written first novel." The Lit Hub

One of the Chicago Review of Books Best Books from Independent Presses in April

"Esmé Weijun Wang’s new novel focuses on the complex relationships among a family with a prosperous business in the post-war United States, and the conflicts and questions of family that occur over time." Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"The Border of Paradise is a magnificent achievement an exhortation for human tenderness and individual dignity in the most difficult of circumstances. Wang explores identity and family with a sense of drama that borders on gothic, without ever sacrificing the psychological texture that connects us to her characters." Adrienne Celt, author of The Daughters

"Esme Weijun Wang's relentlessly moving debut The Border of Paradise is a profound epic of potent darkness with all sorts of unexpected light. The story of the Nowak family contains notes of Lidia Yuknavitch, Christine Schutt, and Kevin Wilson, and yet remains unlike anything I've ever read. Trauma is rendered gorgeously, from every angle, within every possibility. Whether tackling New York, California, or Taiwan, Wang performs this novel with glorious courage, ambition, passion, and style." Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion

"A stunning meditation on the meaning of marriage, the limits of language, and the inescapable solitude of the mind. Esme Weijun Wang’s writing is spellbinding; her characters are hauntingly alive." Jennifer DuBois, author of Cartwheel

About the Author

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.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01E2XN3MC
Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Unnamed Press (March 21, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 21, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1461 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 292 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,331,249 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,352 in Psychological Literary Fiction
- #6,512 in Psychological Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #10,873 in Contemporary Literary Fiction

Customer Reviews:
4.2 265 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Esmé Weijun Wang

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5

265 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Evan

The Best Book I Have Read This Year

Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2016

Verified Purchase

There are times I start reading a book and stop at the end of the first page. I don't do this because the writing is bad or the story didn't pull me in. I do it because what I have read so far is so beautiful that I have to stop and make myself realize that I will only get one chance to read this for the first time and I need to be present. I need to enjoy every word and page because this will be the only time i experience it without knowing what is to come.

I did this with The Border of Paradise.

Wang's prose is beautiful. Her characters are real. I do not know what it is like to live with mental illness but David's descriptions of when he is having an attack are vivid and haunting. The plot is courageous, sprawling, perfectly connected. I felt that everything included in the novel needed to be there and nothing more needed to be added, which is rare for me to say. There are beautiful moments and there are moments that are hard to witness and I imagine were even harder to write. This novel gave me everything I want out of a work of literature.

If you love beautiful prose and characters that will break you to bits and you love them for it, then get this book!

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Aicha Hind Rifai

Dark and interesting

Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2016

Verified Purchase

The characters are developed with significant subjectivity to allow their choices and actions to appear predictable. Mental illness ( David), early loss and trauma ( Daisy and Marianne), cultural and personal alienation (Daisy) intertwine to impact the lives of the next generation in a harrowing way. The writing is successful in transmitting the increasingly dark and dangerous atmosphere.

Helpful

Jade Ivy

An experience like no other.

Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2016

Verified Purchase

In April, I pre-ordered a book for the very first time in my entire life. It's not that I don't do it on purpose, but I never catch a book before its release into the world. More than anything, I find a book after months or even years after its existence. The book is by a woman who I adore to bits and crumbs, Esme Weijun Wang. I stumbled upon her blog years ago, maybe from a certain essay she wrote about something close to me but I know that I stayed around for years to come (and as a budding editor, I wanted to pick her brain from a safe distance on how she made her business work). So imagine my excitement when she announced a novel, her debut novel that I can hold and own and say that I knew of her the years prior and read her blog and even joined her Facebook group for the Encouragement Notes and spoke with her in comments a time or two. She even read my blog post on my more personal blog and commended me on my writing and raw emotions. Ultimate fan goals, right? Yasss! And that excitement stayed with me until the very last page and even informed her about my rather authentic reaction to being finished with it on Twitter. I hated to look like that annoying admirer but as a writer, I knew she would enjoy it even if I did need alone time after finishing.

Following the story of Polish-American David Nowak, we see the unfolding of his life from childhood, adulthood, marriage to his Taiwanese wife, Daisy, the birth of his two children William and Gillian, and inevitably his suicide. In the midst of his mind slipping from him, he has an affair with a childhood sweetheart, Marianne, and has a child by her. But the story is more than his affair. Honestly, it's more than just about him. It's a story about his wife. It's about his daughter raised by his wife, who isn't her mother, and son having to cope with the lost of their father and having only their mother in their small sheltered world. It's about his family watching the man they loved and feared slipping away from them each and every moment. It's more of a story about what happens to this family after they lose him. It's about the last remaining Nowaks and all the crazy s*** they go from then on.

I refuse to spoil it at all.

I can't give away the beauty of this story because it has to be felt. It's not something that can be summarized. It's definitely not something that should be ruined because it begs to be felt, to be heard, to be told from these pages because I'm telling you, I can't stop thinking about the writing let alone the characters trapped inside the pages.

Beginning with the writing, the tone that is set before is mystical. It's a Gothic tale, with something of a grim undertone to each scene that ultimately makes you feel uneasy but wanting to devour more and even more. Gothic always makes me feel sticky, such as hot humidity, and this book made me want to shower after every single read. I felt inside of it, watching from the corner of the living room as this family unfolded into their dysfunction. Each chapter was written to where I could easily empathize with the character and almost defend their way of thinking or even their actions because it was easy to be engrossed by them. The descriptions were tantalizing, and more than enough to make me feel, as I said, like I was standing in their space. It felt raw, my skin clammy from nervous sweats and even a small bout of anxiety from needing answers. Honestly, there were sections that took their time which left me feeling like I wish something would happen. But, in hindsight, the feeling didn't last long. Once the feeling comes, though, it's quickly shoved away by something, whether it be intriguing, shocking, or telling.

Each character has a trait you love and hate. They have many you hate and many you love, really. They're human is the problem, and that's what made me so overtly attached. David, for example, was more like me than I knew how to deal with. His begins with neuroses resulting in a desire to stop wanting to attend church and a case of OCD that he slowly mends with time. When I was younger, in high school, I suffered all the same things. It wasn't church that I stopped wanting to attend but just a string desire to want to disassociate myself with the world. I believe in some ways that we all have had an experience like this, and you feel for him deeply. You worry about him early on as you do when more is revealed of his mind deteriorating, when the schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder takes over and he begins to lose touch with himself. You want him to be better, and truthfully, that's what we all do with mental illnesses, we ache for them to be better and return to who they were before they were 'sick'. The sad point with David is that, there was no him before he was 'sick'. You know that his suicide is inescapable, almost tormenting him all his life, but you still have hope that he doesn't do it. You want to believe in happy endings but it's not how it works.

Then there came what I hated of him. I hated his inability to commit to something, to find himself in music or as a teacher. I hated that he didn't really live in a way that one could have lived and instead he let it devour him whole. I hated him for not loving his wife as he should have. I hated him for what he put her and his children through, not only with his disease but with his suicide. I've suffered the same loss and anger is only natural. I believed in him and he let himself down, and in essence he let me down.

That same compassion went to his wife. Daisy came to America after having a rather affluent life in her own country. David is the one that fell in love with her, maybe truly in love with her or for what his mind assumed to be love, and with that he begged her to come to America. The entire transition resonates with you profoundly. Her passages include untranslated Chinese and Mandarin that made it so much harder to not see her as a character in a book but as an actual individual with a life of her own and a story of her own that started before I even pulled back the first page. Her adjustment to the American life is amazingly beautiful and equally tragic. She can't let go of those things she knew of home, and she refuses to after a point. When she first meets David's mother, there are some English words she does not know with is expressed through blanks where the word would be ("Would you like some ___?"). You begin to feel as much of an outsider as she does. You learn about her and you learn about how she is a culture that she refuses to let go. It continues on when she teaches their children Mandarin and cooks them meals.

I loved William and hated him much like I hated his father. I loved Gillian and hated her much like I hated her father. I loved Marianne and I didn't hate her but I almost resented her for not staying with David when they were younger and saving everyone else of this trouble and pain.

The book is an experience. With each climax came a gasp and with each gasp was the need to want more. You want to devour this book not for its words but for the fact that even until the very last page, you have to have more. You ask yourself where do you go from here? Where are these people? What am I supposed to do with myself? I can say that for the three weeks of reading this book over food or right in the wake of night, I was addicted and forced myself to savor it. It required savoring.

I was and still am glad for this book. I'm grateful to have something so good happen to me at a time I was in need of something refreshing and new from the usual. I highly recommend it to everyone who loves a story that comes layered with so many themes and characters that are so real it hurts you to let go. Unfortunately, there isn't a quote that I can highlight in this post like I do the others because truly every last piece is pure gold. And again, Esme is a wonderful woman and human being. This book, as a debut novel, let's me know if and when another book comes from her that I won't be let down by any means. I can't congratulate her enough on something so wonderful and now I'm compelled to finally finish my own novella that I've had sitting on the shelf for months. Please do yourself a favor and buy this book in all it's many forms you can.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Jacquie17

This book needs trigger warnings

Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2023

Verified Purchase

This author is an amazing writer. “The Collected Schizophrenias” is a fabulous book, highly recommend. The writing in the book is wonderful as well, but the subject matters, one more so than the other, is very disturbing and I despised reading certain passages. As another reviewer said, “ew.” One character did get their just reward but I would have preferred a more just ending.

Helpful

KB

A Masterful, Wrenching Work of Art

Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2016

Verified Purchase

I've been thinking and thinking about how to describe this book, and the best I can come up with is this: It is absolutely, supremely *masterful.* Wang's writing is sublime, but it's more than that. I've never read a book like this in theme or structure. The story is told from the alternating points of view of its main characters, and each voice felt truly itself. Not in an overly dramatic way, but in an understated, honest way.

What I liked even more was that our perception of each character becomes more nuanced as we get to see them through their own eyes as well as through those of others. The story folds upon itself until it arrives at what feels like the most perfect, heartbreaking, thoroughly unexpected conclusion.

This book left me with approximately 1000 questions (and feelings; oy) about the plot, the characters, and Wang's process of creation. It would be *perfect* for a book club or class discussion.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

JONG YOL LEE

Debut novel? Stunned with its complexity and discomfort....

Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2020

Verified Purchase

On my initial attempt to finish this novel, I had to put it down and walk away from it for a few months. About half into this amazing piece of work, I felt so emotionally distressed that I could not carry forward. I felt like I was being drawn inside the head of a person with severe mental defect. That's how hyper-realistic Esme Wang creates the scenes and explores the dark depths of a mind inflicted with disease -- in this case, a suicide.

The story, told from different character's perspectives, unfold an ever more complex and troubling episodes of a family's multigenerational tragedy. Not one chapter seems to be out of place and the stories are wonderfully woven together with surprising plot twists and turns.

I am stunned that this is an author's debut novel. I am simply speechless.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

京都人

Miserable book about awful people

Reviewed in Japan on December 9, 2023

Verified Purchase

MINOR SPOILERS BELOW

Three stars for writing ability, one star for content and enjoyment.

I really feel that if an author is going to make me read material as sickening as this - warning, this book includes graphic descriptions of sibling sexual abuse involving teenage children - they ought to at least be examining the impact or depicting a path to recovery or SOMETHING. It felt gratuitous.

On top of that, the underlying messages seem to amount to a) there is no way to escape the cycle of generational trauma except through suicide b) suicide is inherently selfish and cowardly. Despite the last-second hint towards a hopeful ending, that's what I came away feeling was conveyed.

Given the above issues, I couldn't with good conscience recommend this book to anyone.

A few other thoughts:

The story is well-plotted and structured overall, although some events require serious suspension of disbelief. Not badly-written on a prose level, but there were quite a few awkwardly-constructed sentences that I'm surprised an editor didn't pick up on. Apart from a few era-appriopriate racial terms and slurs, the writing is very 2010s MFA-style even when supposedly from the POV of someone born in the 1930s.

Writing Jia-Hui/Daisy's POV partly in Chinese was an interesting idea but so inconsistent as to be confusing (besides, it says at the top of her section that it's "in translation", which makes the switching nonsensical...). What did work well was showing when she failed to understand half of what the other characters were saying in English. I found her descent midway through into full-on abusive paranoia jarring, since she came off as a resilient and resourceful (if hard-hearted) character before then. It did feel like the author demonised and punished the Asian/half-Asian characters more than the "angelic" blond white characters, though that's something I need to ruminate on a little more to unpack.

E. J.

Dark, intense, claustrophobic

Reviewed in Germany on November 5, 2016

Verified Purchase

This is a book is about entitled jerks, being trapped in an isolation of your own making, of someone else's making. It is a dark story of family trauma and sickness and abuse, decades long. I do enjoy these kind of multi-generational stories - like Eugenides' Middlesex, with which The Border of Paradise shares some themes? feelings? if not overall tone, which is even darker here, and very claustrophobic. I am glad the book switched between perspectives, because illness and upbringing or no, David Novak and his son are giant jerks and I didn't want to be stuck in their heads for long. Daisy less so - her past is never quite made explicit, but this character really shows a very believable and understandable fall, step by step, into utter isolation and ultimately extreme behaviour. I felt so very trapped with Gillian. By that point, the switch to the children, I couldn't put the book down and read straight through to the end, trapped in this suffocating house with them. I loved the passage where Daisy likens her husband's illness to a wild, bucking horse beneath him. I struggled, sometimes, with the descriptions of suicide and self-harm, but honestly even more so with how frankly the man spoke about being entitled to the women, how often the thought of violence crossed their minds. For me that seems a darker, more disturbing place than any suicide. My favourite character, the strongest and best, the hero, was Sarah.

One person found this helpful

Rei

This book is beautifully written, and a good creepy/disturbing read

Reviewed in Canada on August 29, 2016

Verified Purchase

I've never read a novel where I simultaneously identified with and was so angry with the characters at the same time. This book is beautifully written, and a good creepy/disturbing read. It makes you want to keep reading to find out what happens, and the pacing is such that by the end, you'll be left with your mouth open and your mind blown.

Amazon Customer

The Haunting of Paradise's Borders...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 2, 2016

Verified Purchase

A truly mesmerising book. A beautiful, intimate view into how a single man can create a cascade of errors, mishappenings, and situations of misplaced love. If you want to look into the life of mental health from an angle that is neither over-protective, over-kindly, or malicious, but rather a true, objective perspective of what it means to be different from the herd, then I heartily suggest reading this book. It is still haunting me.

3 people found this helpful

Benchmark

End Felt Too Sudden, Rushed? A little disappointed.

Reviewed in Canada on January 17, 2021

Verified Purchase

Really dark, great read all throughout and is so odd that it keeps you glued to the pages, especially when it gets to the children...interpreting their thoughts and what could potentially happen with heaps of trauma paired with the brainwashing of the parents, isolation and whatnot. Wild. The only reason I'm giving 3 stars is because I felt the ending was rushed and really out of character for the particular person/people (trying not to spoil anything...) Actually was really disappointed but other than the ending its awesome.

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Follow the author

Image Unavailable

The Border of Paradise: A Novel Kindle Edition

Customers who bought this item also bought

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Esmé Weijun Wang

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries