Review: The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

CARMELA CIURARU reviews The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara in NYT

In 1976, Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek won a Nobel Prize for identifying a fatal disease in a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea. By the time of his death in 2008, Gajdusek had achieved another kind of notoriety, having been imprisoned for sexually abusing one of the dozens of native children he had adopted. Hanya Yanagihara’s suspenseful first novel, “The People in the Trees,” is based loosely on this true story, with a number of horrifying twists.