A Little Life: The Million-Copy Bestseller
May 2015 · Pan Macmillan
4.5star
134 reviewsreport
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752
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About this ebook
'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 And withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.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
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
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
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
Ratings and reviews
4.5
134 reviews
Victoria Thwaites
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April 14, 2024
There aren't enough words to describe this book. Heartbreaking, beautiful, powerful, soul destroying, it is a roller coaster of emotions. with the most wonderful characters and their interlaced friendships and worlds. the most emotive book I have ever read. Ever.
Gwen Guthrie
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February 19, 2016
At once tender and heartbreakingly beautiful, gut-wrenching and painful, this page-turning story gets into your heart and under your skin. You have the feeling that you will never be the same again, so profoundly moving is it. Quite simply, probably the most beautifully written novel I have ever read.
7 people found this review helpful
Arjun Raj
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February 13, 2017
But if you get through it, although you might have had been exposed to certain realities of humanity that you never wanted to know, by that point, you won't regret it and it won't make you depressed, instead you somehow develop more empathy. As a writer, being able to write something like this is so much power to have and one can only dream of one day being able to attain and possess that much power. As a reader, I don't have the vocabulary to quite express how I feel.
19 people found this review helpful
About the author
Hanya Yanagihara is the author of three novels: To Paradise, A Little Life and The People in the Trees. She lives in New York City.
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