Fact and fiction intertwine to tell a credible story of the United States' deadliest cult. "Paradise Undone" unearths the psychological manipulation that pushed the victims of the Peoples Temple to enact the tragic events of the Jonestown Massacre.



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.



A haunting and deeply human portrayal of Jonestown, capturing both hope and devastation



Paradise Undone is a quiet, devastating novel that lingers long after you finish it. Annie Dawid approaches Jonestown not as a spectacle, but as a deeply human tragedy, focusing on the emotional and psychological paths that led people there in the first place... That moral complexity is what makes the novel so unsettling.



Through the voices of Marceline, Virgil, Watts, and Truth, I felt the devotion, doubt, and despair of people caught in something far bigger than themselves. Their struggles and their terrible decisions brought about their conflicts which made it impossible to remain unmoved.