A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

Hardcover, 720 pages

English language

Published Feb. 5, 2015 by Doubleday.

ISBN:: 978-0-385-53925-8
OCLC Number:: 911507167

(8 reviews)

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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.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

In rich and resplendent prose, Hanya Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and …

In rich and resplendent prose, Hanya Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance. --front flap

18 editions

airdog reviewed A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

handle with care

4 stars

You need to be either sadist or masochist to endure this work without too much damage. At least 600 of the 720 pages of the book are intense descriptions of intricate sufferings. But I can tell you that you'll never look at your relationship with your significant other the same way ever again as she delves during the whole book on the relationship between the sufferer (Jude) and his friend/lover Willem. Yanagihara in her pursuit of pain is merciless and follows each ramifications to it's bitter end. A life changing work for me.

bungakumi reviewed A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Review of 'A Little Life' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I feel so heartbroken. I felt like this throughout the whole book. But now it's worse. Now I want to cry for a week. Because none of them deserved pain and yet they got hurt. They deserved the world, all the happiness of it. Everything.
So I feel nothing now. Just so damned disconsolated.