A Little Life: A Novel

Hanya Yanagihara

Mar 2015 · Sold by Anchor

About this eBook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE

A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.

Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

Ratings and reviews

College. A time to stumble, fumble and try on adult behaviors; while still under the guidance of distant parents. Then death and suicide enter the privileged students. Forcing a change. I would tell you more, but that would require my purchasing the book. The SAMPLE, however, was well written and engrossing. BUY IT! Let me know how it ends,😀

glorious and tragic, hollows you out with sadness and leaves you feeling clean and pure and raw. although to be fair it's more of a fantasy book than a fiction; the world that jude and friends inhabit is more of an idealized world created in the campus of a liberal arts college than the real one (horrific suffering of jude aside, obviously). either way, it's a fantastic read with a delightful cast of characters who all have well fleshed out relationships with each other and the world that they inhabit.

The reasons the book is so successful lies in its honesty. The author pulls forth the deepest insecurities of the human mind without the embarrassment of putting these ideas out there. Without the "what-if" of whether or not anyone else will understand what she's trying to say and through that courage, which itself is not the lack of fear, of being able to still write this book with these intimate reflections she allows the audience to connect with these characters with such an intensity that we become them. And as we watch them drowning in their own chaos, the comfort they receive and revelation and enlightenment and unearthing become our own.

About the author

HANYA YANAGIHARA lives in New York City.