What Kind of Paradise

A Novel

By: Janelle Brown

Narrated by: Peter Ganim, Helen Laser

A teenage girl breaks free from her father’s world of isolation to discover that her whole life is a lie in this propulsive new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things and Watch Me Disappear.

“A twisty, sharp coming-of-age story for our strange techno-utopian times.”—Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans

The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.

As Jane becomes a teenager she starts pushing against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past, and her mother’s death: San Francisco. It is a city in the midst of a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling internet, and where she will come to question everything she values.

In this sweeping, suspenseful novel from bestselling author Janelle Brown, we see a young woman on a quest to understand how we come to know ourselves. It is a bold and unforgettable story about parents and children; nature and technology; innocence and knowledge; the losses of our past and our dreams for the future.

©2025 Janelle Brown (P)2025 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“What Kind of Paradise is a twisty, sharp coming-of-age story for our strange techno-utopian times. It brims with suspense and family secrets, all while asking big questions about the cost of progress.”—Rachel Khong, author of Real Americans

“This is the work of a writer who truly knows how to thrill. Janelle Brown has constructed a tender novel about parents and children, one that leaves readers weighing unanswerable questions of ethics and responsibility.”—Rumaan Alam, author of Entitlement and Leave the World Behind

“An intelligent and thoughtful page-turner that explores the blurry lines between right and wrong, truth and fiction, choice and fate . . . Janelle Brown methodically unravels my favorite kind of mystery—that of who we are and what we believe at our deepest core.”—Jessica Knoll, author of Bright Young Women and Luckiest Girl Alive