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Paradise Undone

Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown

Paradise Undone

Fact and fiction intertwine to tell a cohesive and credible story of the United States’ greatest single loss of civilian lives in the 20th century – 919 American citizens died that day in the jungle. Four protagonists – two dead and two living, two men and two women, two Black and two white – tell their stories here, illuminating the formerly shadowed places populated by those who believed in Jim Jones.

Cover design by Joe Samuels.

About the Author

Annie Dawid has published five books, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry and essays.  She teaches at the University of Denver, University College master’s program in creative writing online from her home in very rural Colorado, Her focus on the murder/suicides at Jonestown in 1978, when she was a first-year undergraduate, dates from March 2004. At the University of North Dakota Writers Conference, where she was a Master-Teacher in residence, she met a friend of survivors of Jonestown. Subsequently, she immersed herself  in research and changed the subject of her next novel to the Jonestown massacre. Years of study and writing followed before finishing Paradise Undone in time for the 30-year anniversary in 2008. Eventually, she met those survivors, who run the Jonestown Institute Archives, and, with them and many others, hopes to illuminate the lives of the 900+ Peoples Temple members who died in the jungle, human beings not named Jim Jones.

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