Paradise City

A novel that seeks to answer big questions—of love and death, ambition and failure, responsibility and guilt—with a rich cast of characters from every strata of society.

Four disparate characters find themselves linked together in Paradise City. Howard Pink is a wildly successful businessman still struggling to cope fifteen years after his nineteen-year-old daughter disappeared. Beatrice Kizza fled persecution from Uganda where homosexuality is illegal. She now works as a maid at a hotel Howard frequents. Esme Reade, an ambitious staff reporter on a Sunday tabloid, is desperate to get the Howard Pink interview for which all London reporters froth at the mouth. Carol Hetherington, a widow who has time to keep an eye on her neighbors’ actions, makes an astonishing discovery.

Paradise City explores what a city means to those who come seeking their fortune or a better life. It is also a story of absence and loss, of how we shape ourselves around the spaces that people leave behind.

Elizabeth Day is an award-winning British journalist who has worked for the Evening Standard, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Mail on Sunday, and is now a feature writer for the Observer. Her first novel, Scissors, Paper, Stone, was published in the UK and won a Betty Trask Award. Her second novel, Home Fires, marked her U.S. debut. Day grew up in Northern Ireland and currently lives in London, England, with her husband. Visit her website at www.elizabethdayonline.co.uk.