Following Original Prin, a NYTBR Editor’s Choice and Globe and Mail Best Book, Dante’s Indiana is an extraordinary journey through the divine comedies and tragedies of our time.

Middle-aged, married, but living on his own, Prin has lost his way. Desperate for money and purpose, he moves to small-town Indiana to work for an evangelical millionaire who’s building a theme park inspired by Dante’s Inferno. He quickly becomes involved in the difficult lives of his co-workers and in the wider struggles of their opioid-ravaged community while trying to reconcile with his distant wife and distant God. Both projects spin out of control, and when a Black teenager is killed, creationists, politicians and protesters alike descend. In the midst of this American chaos, Prin risks everything to help the lost and angry souls around him while searching for his own way home. Affecting and strange, intimate and big-hearted, Dante’s Indiana is a darkly divine comedy for our time.

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto. His novels, which include Original Prin and Dante’s Indiana, have been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize. He lives in Toronto with his wife and four daughters. Little Sanctuary is his first novel for young readers.

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“[Dante's Indiana] mixes the outrageous social satire of George Saunders or Salman Rushdie with Prin’s more solemn and inward religious searching. The unique result juxtaposes the ridiculous and the sublime—fitting as both an homage to Dante and a portrayal of America.” — Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Boyagoda set himself a challenge, and it’s one that he’s up to ... Boyagoda makes it seem easy with a series of apt similes ... This is the sort of imaginative verbal panache that in our own vernacular pays tribute to Dante as literary guide ... The classics, however, are always reimagined in ways that respond to the personal anxieties and public crises of our own time. In the shattered funhouse of the twenty-first century we may be expected to redefine the content of a faith that sustains.” — Toronto Star

“Witty and wrenching.” — Globe & Mail

“Dante’s Indiana succeeds as a funny, unpredictable and occasionally moving tale.” — Winnipeg Free Press

“Boyagoda’s novel might be one of the best ways to “remember Dante forward”—to remember him in the present tense. By channeling Dante in a satirical vein, Boyagoda helps us see the impulses shaping the American and global economic order as spiritual forces—and the decisions made by individuals, communities, and even nations as products of disordered desire.” — Image Journal