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- 21 June, 2015: Reviewed
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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.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