'I'm not exaggerating when I say this novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship. It's one of those books that stays with you forever.' - Dua Lipa
The million-copy bestseller, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, by the author of To Paradise, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance.
Winner of Fiction of the Year at the British Book Awards
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize
Finalist for the US National Book Award for Fiction
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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.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.
'Yanagihara takes you so deeply into the lives and minds of these characters that you struggle to leave them behind.' - The Times
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015
Shortlisted for the US National Book Awards 2015
'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 is unlike anything else out there . . . Quite simply unforgettable.' Independent on Sunday
'Utterly compelling . . . An extraordinary novel. It is impossible to put down . . . And it is almost impossible to forget.' Daily Express
'A devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch's, a few sizes larger.' Observer
'A Little Life makes for near-hypnotically compelling reading . . . An astonishing achievement: a novel of grand drama and sentiment, but it's a canvas Yanagihara has painted with delicate, subtle brushstrokes.' Independent
A Little Life asks serious questions about humanism and euthanasia and psychiatry and any number of the partis pris of modern western life. 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.
