A novel of extraordinary intelligence and heart, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark and haunting examination of the tyranny of experience and memory.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction Winner of Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards Finalist for the National Book Awards The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance. When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome - but that will define his life forever.

Details

ISBN13: 9781447294832
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 736
Edition:
Publication Date:
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 19.6(H)x13.1(L)x4.5(W)488
Weight (gm): 488

Author Biography

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.

Reviews

A singularly profound and moving work . . . It's not often that you read a book of this length and find yourself thinking "I wish it was longer" but Yanagihara takes you so deeply into the lives and minds of these characters that you struggle to leave them behind * The Times *
A book unlike any other . . . A devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch's, a few sizes larger * The Guardian *
Exquisite . . . The book shifts from a generational portrait to something darker and more tender: an examination of the depths of human cruelty, counterbalanced by the restorative powers of friendship * The New Yorker *
[A] wholly immersive unforgettable read . . . You won't stop reading. And it's a novel that changes you * Evening Standard *
Utterly compelling . . . quite an extraordinary novel. It is impossible to put down . . . And it is almost impossible to forget * Daily Express *
Hypnotic . . . An intimate, operatic friendship between four men * The Economist *
A Little Life is unlike anything else out there. Over the top, beyond the pale and quite simply unforgettable * The Independent *
Piercing . . . [Yanagihara is] an author with the talent to interrogate the basest and most beautiful extremes of human behaviour with sustained, bruising intensity * The Times Literary Supplement *
Capacious and consuming . . . Immersive * The Boston Globe *
Beautiful * Los Angeles TImes *
Remarkable. . . . An epic study of trauma and friendship written with such intelligence and depth of perception that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be measured * The Wall Street Journal *
Astonishing * The Atlantic *
Deeply moving . . . A wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship * NPR *
Affecting and transcendent * The Washington Post *