A Little Life: The Million-Copy Bestseller

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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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.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.

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 Little Life makes for near-hypnotically compelling reading, a vivid, hyperreal portrait of human existence that demands intense emotional investment . . . An astonishing achievement: a novel of grand drama and sentiment, but it's a canvas Yanagihara has painted with delicate, subtle brushstrokes. * Independent *
Here is 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. * Wall Street Journal *
It's not hyperbole to call this novel a masterwork - if anything that word is simply just too little for it * San Francisco Chronicle *
A Little Life feels elemental, irreducible-and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it * New Yorker *
Utterly compelling . . . quite an extraordinary novel. It is impossible to put down . . . And it is almost impossible to forget. * Daily Express *
A darkly beautiful tale of love and friendship... I've read a lot of emotionally taxing books in my time, but A Little Life . . . is the only one I've read as an adult that's left me sobbing. * Los Angeles Times *
Capacious and consuming . . . Boasts a scale and immersive power to rival the recent epics of Donna Tartt and Elizabeth Gilbert. * Boston Globe *
Astonishing . . . tender, torturous and achingly alive to the undeniable pain that can scar a life. * Psychologies *
It's Entourage directed by Bergman; it's the great 90s novel a quarter of a century too late; it's a devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch's, a few sizes larger. -- Alex Preston * Observer *

Author Bio

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.