A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.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

Reviewed by roundtableknight on

5 of 5 stars

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Rating: 5/5 stars

I have never openly sobbed more than I did while reading the last 100 pages of this book. Everything about this book was so heart wrenching and beautifully written that at times I could convince myself that this was a different type of book; one with a happy ending. There is something about all of these characters I met while reading this book that I will never forget, and more importantly what they resembled about life and the joys and terrors of it.

Is it selfish to say that I don't want anyone to read this book? That the characters feel like a part of me that I don't want exposed for others to preside over and make their own statements about? This book closed the page on me, on who I was before I read this book, and now that I finished it, and I love it even more for that reason. If you do end up reading this, I warm you that you will see both the best and most selfless characters in this book, and more wicked and bilious as well, but that is life, is it not?

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 25 July, 2020: Finished reading
  • 25 July, 2020: Reviewed