The People in the Trees

The People in the Trees is the first novel by the American writer Hanya Yanagihara, published in 2013. Yanagihara has said it was partly inspired by the virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, who was honoured by the scientific community before being convicted of child abuse.

The book is presented as the memoirs of Dr Abraham Norton Perina, a researcher who signs on with the anthropologist Paul Tallent for an expedition to the island of Ivu'ivu in Micronesia. The party finds the lost tribe, and Perina notices that some of its members live to great ages, which he traces to a turtle they eat. He takes that discovery home, where it brings him scientific fame and a Nobel Prize, and the memoir describes at length how the people whose island it was were left out of the account, including the family he brought back with him and the accusations that eventually ended his career.

The novel is framed with footnotes and an editor's introduction, so the reader is asked to weigh the narrator's account against the evidence of what he did, and the setting of the story is one element rather than the subject.