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Review: ‘A Little Life,’ Hanya Yanagihara’s Traumatic Tale of Male Friendship

By Janet Maslin

  • Sept. 30, 2015
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a little life book report

Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life,” published in March, turned out to be one of the most talked-about novels of the summer. It’s a big, emotional, trauma-packed read with a voluptuous prose style that wavers between the exquisite and the overdone. A potboiler about very intense male friendship, it’s a sui generis phenomenon that became a runaway hit. And it is now a shortlisted contender for the Man Booker Prize , which will be awarded on Oct. 13.

“A Little Life” initially looks like the story of four college friends who have come to New York from their Massachusetts school and are managing to lead hermetically sealed lives together. They are Malcolm, who still lives with his rich parents; J. B., already an ambitious artist; Willem, a good-looking waiter; and Jude, a mesmerizing wounded bird whom the others can’t figure out. These four intend to be friends for life, and the book intends each of them to be very, very successful in his chosen field some day.

It opens at an unspecified time, when Jude and Willem are living in picturesque poverty in Chinatown, their closeness solidified by shared deprivation. They also share a sense of suffering. Jude is secretive about his past, but we quickly learn of Willem that before he was “a kind man, he was a kind boy.” His disabled brother died young, and Willem will carry that memory with him as Jude grows from beautiful boy to a man who requires more and more patience and loving care. Their early friendship is so warmly described that this vibrant part of the book is irresistible.

Willem’s good looks and innate talent ease his way into acting. Meanwhile, J. B., who is black, turns out to be a talented artist who concentrates on paintings of his three friends. He often paints Jude, whose unfathomable mixed-race origins and air of mystery make for beautiful images that are soon the talk of the art world, if also a great annoyance to Jude himself. And Malcolm, who is half-black, and easily needled by J. B. about it, has a gift for architecture that he parlays into a successful business. Someday he will be designing the fabulously hip homes (yes, plural) that Jude’s success as a fierce litigator allows him to buy.

So upward they all go. But this is not a happy story. At its heart is Jude’s secret suffering, and Malcolm and J. B. soon fade into minor characters as race becomes a nonissue. It will turn out that Jude has spent his whole life — from the moment he was first discovered, as a newborn either in or near a garbage bag — being subjected to horrendous abuse by a series of sadists who simply defy belief. The full parade of them adds up to almost more misery than one novel can contain.

Ms. Yanagihara, who now works for The New York Times as a deputy editor of T magazine, doles out the memories of them sparingly, breaking down Jude’s revelations into separate flashbacks that are scattered throughout “A Little Life.” As the book toughens and saddens, those flashbacks are mixed with present-day horrors about Jude’s repeated efforts to maim himself, and the small army of loving friends, elders and professionals who try desperately to help him.

Ms. Yanagihara’s prose is always ripe with modifiers, as when the book conjures rats that go “squeaking plumply underfoot”; is it possible for rats to squeak skinnily? A lot of this 720-page book is devoted to torrentially long and powerful descriptions, and without question, they pack a lot of power. But her mixing of metaphors makes for a mess. The phantoms that haunt Jude can be hyenas with “snapping, foaming jaws” at one moment, “banshees demanding his attention, snatching and tearing at him with their long, needley fingers” the next. The banshees and the hyenas appear on the same page, along with the lineup of human demons who have caused Jude to imagine them.

Willem and Judy, as he is often called, get a long way through life with a platonic relationship, even though they love each other deeply. For all its strong passions and intense, even ghoulish, medical curiosity, this book is conspicuously squeamish about sex. That reflects Jude’s terrible past, which is eventually exposed in all its ogre-filled detail. But there is far more physical attention paid to Jude’s many gruesome wounds, and his methods of inflicting them on himself, and the efforts of one superhumanly loving doctor to protect him from himself, than to any kind of physical pleasure.

Willem and Jude’s love for each other exists on a higher plane, with Willem as the loving parent Jude never had. Just to make sure that position is filled, Ms. Yanagihara also has a law professor, Harold, and his wife, Julia, formally adopt Jude when he is well into adulthood. Jude can hardly believe his good fortune when he gets a birth certificate that has parents’ names on it.

If, at times, Jude can’t believe his good fortune, readers may have the same problem. A description of the perfect country place built by Jude the Lawyer and Willem the Movie Star, with its long driveway, glass-cubed house, indoor and outdoor pools and enchanting wildflowers, throws Jude into raptures, because it’s “a place where beauty was so uncomplicated.” For a double dose of the vicarious, you are invited to press your nose to that glass and wait for Jude’s awful history to destroy him.

“A Little Life” eventually develops a relentless downhill trajectory. It might have had even more impact with fewer wild beasts prowling through fewer pages. But Ms. Yanagihara is still capable of introducing great shock value into her story to override its predictability. One major development here is gasp-inducingly unexpected, the stuff of life but also of melodrama. It may not lift the bleak mood, but it explains a lot about this voyeuristic book’s popular success.

A Little Life

By Hanya Yanagihara

720 pages. Doubleday. $30.

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a little life book report

A Little Life

Hanya yanagihara, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

A Little Life: Introduction

A little life: plot summary, a little life: detailed summary & analysis, a little life: themes, a little life: quotes, a little life: characters, a little life: symbols, a little life: theme wheel, brief biography of hanya yanagihara.

A Little Life PDF

Historical Context of A Little Life

Other books related to a little life.

  • Full Title: A Little Life
  • When Written: 2010s
  • Where Written: New York 
  • When Published: 2015
  • Literary Period: Contemporary
  • Genre: Contemporary Fiction; Bildungsroman
  • Setting: New York; Cambridge, Massachusetts; the western U.S.
  • Climax: After enduring a lifetime of endless pain and suffering, Jude St. Francis dies by suicide at the age of 53. 
  • Antagonist: Brother Luke; Dr. Traylor; Caleb Porter
  • Point of View: first person; third person

Extra Credit for A Little Life

Another Life. In 2018, Dutch theater company Toneelgroep Amsterdam debuted its stage adaptation of A Little Life . Staying true to the book (which is over 800 pages long), the production lasted four hours.

Fade to Black. Rather fittingly, author Hanya Yanagihara has described A Little Life as like an ombre cloth, which begins light on one end and gradually darkens until it appears nearly black at the other end. Her description is certainly apt, as the novel follows protagonist Jude St. Francis from a place of relative stability to complete despair, and finally, to death.

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'A Little Life': An Unforgettable Novel About The Grace Of Friendship

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John Powers

A Little Life

A Little Life: why everyone should read this modern-day classic

It may be dark and traumatic, but Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel offers a refreshingly modern take on friendship in the age of anxiety

I t’s early in the morning when my brother rings me, exhausted and strung out. He didn’t get much sleep the night before; he was up reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, speeding towards the book’s devastating conclusion.

Ever since Christmas – when the novel’s prevalence on year-end lists guaranteed its spot among my friends as a gloomy, dauntingly large stocking filler – the messages have been rolling in.

My friend Tom texted, “Horrendous but there are 150+ pages of bad stuff,” and then, a week later, “I am still thinking about the book.” On Facebook, one friend told me, “IT IS SLAYING ME,” and another suggested a support group.

They’re not alone. According to Jon Michaud in the New Yorker : “Yanagihara’s novel can also drive you mad, consume you and take over your life.” He’s right: the big book of our Australian summer is as bleak and addictive as they come.

Set in the present, A Little Life is about four young men – friends from the same college – who move to New York to chase big careers. They are all, improbably, incredibly successful: JB in the art world, Malcolm as a “starchitect”, Willem as an actor and Jude as a litigator. The story narrows its focus on Jude: broken, full of secrets, self-harming, slicing his calves and arms at 2am, his body a web of scar tissue.

Yes, it’s a lovely beach read.

I finished A Little Life and I feel like I just climbed out of a well and my fingernails are torn up — Meredith Alling (@meremyth) January 17, 2016

Reading, of course, is a solo activity. But occasionally a book forces demands on you that are so immense you need consolation from others. You urge your book club to read it (or you form a book club to that end); you post status updates, you tweet; you give it to other people to read, burdening them so that you’re not left alone with this thing .

It’s not just me and my pals. According to the Wall Street Journal , in “recent months it [the book] has gathered momentum, fuelled by booksellers and readers, particularly on Twitter, where people have shared their intensely emotional responses … [On Twitter] they have called it ‘upsetting’, ‘harrowing’ and ‘traumatic’. But many also say it’s the best book they have ever read.”

i will genuinely never recover from reading a little life — s ☾ (@deadgansey) January 17, 2016
Snape died, Bowie died, my boiler broke and I'm in the final chapters of A Little Life. January is proving to be a very bleak month. — Sophie Robinson (@SophieRbnsn89) January 16, 2016

So why has it struck such a chord? Despite being on the Booker shortlist , the US novelist’s prose is a little patchy and the plot is at times almost operatic in its hysteria. How much suffering and abuse can one character believably endure? Yanagihara told the Guardian : “One of the things my editor and I did fight about is the idea of how much a reader can take,” and you’ll find it hard to find another mainstream literary fiction that equals the most egregious “misery memoir” for its plotlines. As the New Yorker pointed out, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Emma Donoghue’s Room let the worst abuses appear off stage. Not so here.

Sometimes books come along that match the times. A Little Life is the perfect chronicle of our age of anxiety, providing all its attendant dramas (cutting, binges and childhood sexual abuse) as well as its solaces: friendship, drugs, travel, love affairs and interior design.

In the New York Review of Books , Daniel Mendelsohn noted the novel “reveals itself as a very twenty-first century tale indeed: abuse, victimisation, self-loathing” and wondered if a “generalised sense of helplessness and acute anxiety have become the norm”.

The piece referred to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a new prevalence of cases in which seemingly trivial things (a mouse in the dorm room, for instance) caused great upset to the young people involved, leading them to seek counselling. “Young people are increasingly encouraged to see themselves not as agents in life but as potential victims: of their dates, their roommates, their professors, of institutions and history in general,” Mendelsohn wrote.

In this culture, he said, the victim has the status: “To such readers [of A Little Life], the ugliness of this author’s subject must bring a kind of pleasure, confirming their pre-existing view of the world as a site of victimisation and little else.”

Generalised anxiety and dread is in the atmosphere, after all. In the new godless world, there are no fixed external points or a commonly held set of beliefs; all that was solid has long ago melted into air. Generation Y, raised with the promise of an extraordinary life – a spectacular career, freewheeling adventures, money, love, the lot – has found that promise undelivered. Suddenly there’s a lot to be afraid of; success is difficult to achieve and hard to hang on to, you can’t defeat your past and, in the words of musician Father John Misty, “No one ever really knows you and life is brief.”

Our daily social interactions have blown out from a few dozen to potential thousands, which we carry around with us every moment on our smartphones. Restless capital means a working life that more closely resembles greyhounds chasing the rabbit than any kind of craftsmanship. There’s no rest, no respite, no commonly held beliefs to bind us together, and there’s a gap between dreams and reality; the big life you wanted is the little life you made.

But if anxiety is our age’s burden, then friendship is its balm.

Friendship is the solace in A Little Life, as it is in any life riven with anxiety, and it is rendered so exquisitely lifelike here – replete with beauty and dark currents – that it almost approximates the real thing.

The characters’ friendships represent the type of love known as agape, described by CS Lewis in The Four Loves as the highest level of love known to humanity: “A selfless love, a love that was passionately committed to the wellbeing of the other.” Mark Twain put friendship at the centre of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and David Malouf did it with Johnno, but most novelists’ stick to Big Love – the love that includes sex, romance, marriage and ever after.

Yet it’s friendship that saves us time and time again, from the schoolyard to the office and beyond – so why aren’t there more novels and films about it? Why is the sexual relationship always at the centre?

Of course there is sex in A Little Life, but it is sex between friends – and then it becomes something else entirely. Willem thinks at one point of his relationship with Jude: “They were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognised by history or immortalised in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.”

A standout novel of 2014, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 , also featured a friendship at its centre (this one between a man and a woman) and an anxious protagonist in an anxious city, wedged between hurricanes Sandy and Irene. According to Emily Witt in the Guardian : “The close platonic friendship between Alex and Ben has no precedent that I can think of in recent fiction, despite the prevalence of such relationships in the world around me.”

Similarly, it’s the varied complexities of friendship – light, dark; support, competition; admiration, jealousy; love, obsession – which forms the heart of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels series, the runaway success of the past few years.

Most books are still caught up in a world where romance and sex takes precedence, but we’re now in a cultural moment in which relationships – romantic, sexual, platonic, polygamous, online, all this together and more – are accepted as much more fluid and complex than they used to be. As Willem would put it, we are inventing new types of relationships.

A Little Life succeeds and connects because it is willing to explore those nuances. We mightn’t be able to recognise ourselves in the darker material – the cutting, the urge for annihilation – but something rings true and real about the love between friends in an anxious world.

So if you see us sitting on beaches with a big book, weeping, you’ll know why.

  • Hanya Yanagihara

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The Subversive Brilliance of “A Little Life”

By Jon Michaud

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At the beginning of Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel, “A Little Life,” four young men, all graduates of the same prestigious New England university, set about establishing adult lives for themselves in New York City. They are a pleasingly diverse crew, tightly bound to each other: Willem Ragnarsson, the handsome son of a Wyoming ranch hand, who works as a waiter but aspires to be an actor; Malcolm Irvine, the biracial scion of a wealthy Upper East Side family, who has landed an associate position with a European starchitect; Jean-Baptiste (JB) Marion, the child of Haitian immigrants, who works as a receptionist at a downtown art magazine in whose pages he expects, one day soon, to be featured; and Jude St. Francis, a lawyer and mathematician, whose provenance and ethnic origins are largely unknown, even by his trio of friends. Jude, we later learn, was a foundling, deposited in a bag by a dumpster and raised by monks.

For the first fifty or so pages, as the characters attend parties, find apartments, go on dates, gossip, and squabble with each other, it is easy for the reader to think he knows what he’s getting into: the latest example of the postgraduate New York ensemble novel, a genre with many distinguished forbears, Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” and Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children” among them. At one point, after his acting career takes off, Willem thinks, “New York City … had simply been an extension of college, where everyone had known him and JB, and the entire infrastructure of which sometimes seemed to have been lifted out of Boston and plunked down within a few blocks’ radius in lower Manhattan and outer Brooklyn.” Yanagihara is a capable chronicler of the struggle for success among the young who flock to New York every autumn, sending up the pretensions of the art world and the restaurant where Willem works, which is predictably staffed by would-be thespians. “New York was populated by the ambitious,” JB observes. “It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common…. Ambition and atheism.”

Yet it becomes evident soon enough that the author has more on her mind than a conventional big-city bildungsroman. For one thing, there’s the huge hunk of paper in the reader’s right hand: more than seven hundred pages, suggesting grander ambitions than a tale of successful careers. There are also curious absences in the text. Yanagihara scrubs her prose of references to significant historical events. The September 11th attacks are never mentioned, nor are the names of the Mayor, the President, or any recognizable cultural figures who might peg the narrative to a particular year. The effect of this is to place the novel in an eternal present day, in which the characters’ emotional lives are foregrounded and the political and cultural Zeitgeist is rendered into vague scenery.

But the clearest sign that “A Little Life” will not be what we expect is the gradual focus of the text on Jude’s mysterious and traumatic past. As the pages turn, the ensemble recedes and Jude comes to the fore. And with Jude at its center, “A Little Life” becomes a surprisingly subversive novel—one that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery. And having upset our expectations once, Yanagihara does it again, by refusing us the consolations we have come to expect from stories that take such a dark turn.

The first real hint of what we’re in for comes on page 67, when Jude wakes Willem, his roommate, saying, “There’s been an accident, Willem; I’m sorry.” Jude is bleeding profusely from his arm, which is wrapped in a towel. He is evasive about the cause of the wound and insists that he doesn’t want to go to a hospital, asking instead that Willem take him to a mutual friend named Andy, who is a doctor. At the end of the visit, having sewn up Jude’s wound, Andy says to Willem, “You know he cuts himself, don’t you?”

The cutting becomes a leitmotif. Every fifty pages or so, we get a scene in which Jude mutilates his own flesh with a razor blade. It is described with a directness that might make some readers queasy: “He has long ago run out of blank skin on his forearms, and he now recuts over old cuts, using the edge of the razor to saw through the tough, webby scar tissue: when the new cuts heal, they do so in warty furrows, and he is disgusted and dismayed and fascinated all at once by how severely he has deformed himself.”

The cutting is both a symptom of and a control mechanism for the profound abuse Jude suffered during the years before he arrived at the university. The precise nature of that suffering is carefully doled out by Yanagihara in a series of flashbacks, each more gruesome than its predecessors. Jude was taught to cut himself by Brother Luke, the monk who abducted him from the monastery. Initially, Brother Luke appeared to be Jude’s savior, spiriting him away from an institution where he was regularly beaten and sexually assaulted. Brother Luke promises Jude that they will go and live together as father and son in a house in the woods, but the reality of their years on the road is much, much grimmer. Eventually, Jude is liberated from Brother Luke, but by then he appears to be marked for sexual violation. “You were born for this,” Brother Luke tells him. And, for a long time, Jude believes him.

The graphic depictions of abuse and physical suffering that one finds in “A Little Life” are rare in mainstream literary fiction. Novels that deal with these matters often fade out when the violence begins. The abuse in “Lolita,” for instance, is largely off camera, so to speak, or wrapped complexly in Nabokov’s lyrical prose. In Emma Donoghue’s “Room,” the child narrator is banished to the closet while his mother is raped by their captor. You are more likely to find sustained and explicit depictions of depravity in genre fiction, where authors seem freer to be less decorous. Stephen King’s “Lisey’s Story,” Steig Larsson’s “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and the torture of Theon Greyjoy in “A Game of Thrones” all came to mind when I was reading “A Little Life” (though the torture of Theon is more explicit in the HBO series than in George R. R. Martin’s books). Yanagihara’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels excessive or sensationalist. It is not included for shock value or titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime fiction. Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character.

One of the few recent novels that’s comparable to “A Little Life” in this respect is Merritt Tierce’s “Love Me Back,” a fierce book about a self-destructive Texas waitress who cuts and burns herself, abuses drugs, and submits herself to debasing sexual encounters. But that novel, at a mere two hundred pages, is a slim silver dagger, not the broadsword that Yanagihara wields. And unlike Tierce’s book, in which there is little reprieve for the reader, Yanagihara balances the chapters about Jude’s suffering with extended sections portraying his friendships and his successful career as a corporate litigator. One of the reasons the book is so long is that it draws on these lighter stretches to make the darker ones bearable. Martin Amis once asked, “Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?” And the surprising answer is that Hanya Yanagihara has: counterintuitively, the most moving parts of “A Little Life” are not its most brutal but its tenderest ones, moments when Jude receives kindness and support from his friends.

What makes the book’s treatment of abuse and suffering subversive is that it does not offer any possibility of redemption and deliverance beyond these tender moments. It gives us a moral universe in which spiritual salvation of this sort does not exist. None of Jude’s tormentors are ever termed “evil” by him or anyone else. During his years of suffering, only once are we told that Jude prays “to a god he didn’t believe in” (note the lowercase “g_”_). Though he is named after the patron saint of lost causes—the name given to him by the monks who raised him—what’s most obviously lost here is the promise of spiritual absolution or even psychological healing. In this godless world, friendship is the only solace available to any of us.

Of course, atheism is not uncommon in contemporary literary novels; with notable exceptions, such as the works of Marilynne Robinson, few such books these days have any religious cast. But perhaps that is why they rarely depict extreme suffering—because it is a nearly impossible subject to engage with directly if you are not going to offer some kind of spiritual solution. “God whispers to us in our pleasures … but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” C. S. Lewis wrote, in “The Problem of Pain.” In “A Little Life,” pain is not a message from God, or a path to enlightenment, and yet Yanigihara listens to it anyway.

In addition to his law degree, Jude pursues a master’s in pure mathematics. At one point, he explains to his friends that he is drawn to math because it offers the possibility of “a wholly provable, unshakable absolute in a constructed world with very few unshakable absolutes.” For Jude, then, mathematics takes the place of religion, in a sense. Later, during one of his worst episodes of suffering, Jude turns to a concept known as the axiom of equality, which states that x always equals x .

It assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality … but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

Yanagihara’s novel can also drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life. Like the axiom of equality, “A Little Life” feels elemental, irreducible—and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it.

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A Little Life: A Novel Kindle Edition

  • Print length 737 pages
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  • Publisher Anchor
  • Publication date March 10, 2015
  • File size 3353 KB
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  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00N6PCZO0
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor (March 10, 2015)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 10, 2015
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 3353 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 737 pages
  • #3 in Literary Sagas
  • #11 in Asian American Literature & Fiction
  • #14 in Contemporary Literary Fiction

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A Little Life: A Novel

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Hanya yanagihara.

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.

http://instagram.com/hanyayanagihara

https://instagram.com/alittlelifebook/

https://www.instagram.com/toparadisenovel/

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A Little Life: The Million-Copy Bestseller

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Hanya Yanagihara

A Little Life: The Million-Copy Bestseller Hardcover – Import, 25 June 2020

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'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 and The People in the Trees, 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

  • Print length 736 pages
  • Language English
  • Dimensions 16.2 x 5.3 x 24.1 cm
  • Publisher Picador
  • Publication date 25 June 2020
  • ISBN-10 1529061245
  • ISBN-13 978-1529061246
  • See all details

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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador (25 June 2020)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 736 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1529061245
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1529061246
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ Customer suggested age: 17 years and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 kg 50 g
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.2 x 5.3 x 24.1 cm
  • #2,797 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Hanya yanagihara.

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.

http://instagram.com/hanyayanagihara

https://instagram.com/alittlelifebook/

https://www.instagram.com/toparadisenovel/

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IMAGES

  1. The Story of the Story: 15 Things You Didn't Know about A Little Life

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  2. A Little Life

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  3. A Little Life (Signed Dated by Author) by Yanagihara, Hanya: As New

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  4. “A Little Life” Changed the Way I View Life and Literature (Book Club

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  5. Book Review: A Little Life

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  6. Summary & Analysis of a Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara by

    a little life book report

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  1. emotionally unavailable boy reads A Little Life

  2. I THINK i like this little life

  3. A LITTLE LIFE BY HANYA YANAGIHARA PART 2 CHAPTER 1

COMMENTS

  1. A Little Life: Full Book Summary

    A Little Life Full Book Summary. Content warning: The following summary contains references to sexual abuse, rape, self-harm, and suicide. The novel's first section introduces the core friend group in the years immediately following their time together in college. Malcolm, JB, Jude, and Willem were college roommates in Hood Hall at an unnamed ...

  2. Review: 'A Little Life,' Hanya Yanagihara's Traumatic Tale of Male

    Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times. Hanya Yanagihara's "A Little Life," published in March, turned out to be one of the most talked-about novels of the summer. It's a big, emotional ...

  3. A Little Life: Full Book Analysis

    Jude fights hard for his little life, and he achieves tremendous success in life and in love. But without the latter, he simply cannot justify the continued fight, and the conclusion at this point seems self-evident. In the novel's coda, Harold laments their failure even as he celebrates the miracle of Jude's existence.

  4. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara review

    Somehow, against all the odds, just like its protagonist, this book survives everything its author throws at it - and if it doesn't quite triumph, it has far outplayed the odds. To order A ...

  5. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

    A Little Life is a strong contender for the award for the most depressing book I've ever read.I swear I'm not even exaggerating. At this point, I'm not certain whether this is a positive or negative review. There's no doubt that this book is beautifully-written and contains some of the most raw and honest prose I've ever had the pleasure or misfortune of reading, but it's a long very long ...

  6. A Little Life: Study Guide

    Overview. Published in 2015, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life tells the story of four college friends and centers on Jude St. Francis, a fragile, brilliant young man who suffers inconceivable trauma yet continues to find reasons for happiness. This epic novel examines sexual abuse, addiction, sexuality, the complicated nature of love, and the ...

  7. A Little Life Study Guide

    The People in the Trees and A Little Life both grapple with the difficult subject matters of trauma, abuse, and human suffering. To Paradise is set in an alternate version of New York City. The novel consists of three sections, each set 100 years apart on the novel's alternate timeline (1893, 1993, and 2093).

  8. Review: 'A Little Life' By Hanya Yanagihara : NPR

    This new book is long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience. As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night. The ...

  9. Reading guide: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

    Her follow-up, A Little Life, was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize. Yanagihara's third novel, To Paradise, reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list when published in 2022. Yanagihara was born in California, has lived in Hawaii and Texas, and now lives in New York City. In 2016, she joined the PEN America Board, and is the ...

  10. A Little Life

    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 PRIZEA Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed ...

  11. A Little Life

    A Little Life is a 2015 novel by American ... where he brutally beats and rapes him, leaving him for dead. Jude nonetheless refuses to report the incident to the police, believing he deserved it. ... Jeff Chu of Vox would "give A Little Life all of the awards". He said that no book he previously read had "captured as perfectly the inner life of ...

  12. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara: 9780804172707

    About A Little Life. 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 ...

  13. A Little Life

    Wall Street Journal The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance. 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.

  14. A Little Life: A Novel

    A Little Life: A Novel. Hardcover - March 10, 2015. Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the ...

  15. A Little Life: why everyone should read this modern-day classic

    It may be dark and traumatic, but Hanya Yanagihara's second novel offers a refreshingly modern take on friendship in the age of anxiety. Brigid Delaney. Tue 19 Jan 2016 17.42 EST. Last modified ...

  16. The Subversive Brilliance of "A Little Life"

    April 28, 2015. At the beginning of Hanya Yanagihara's new novel, "A Little Life," four young men, all graduates of the same prestigious New England university, set about establishing adult ...

  17. A Little Life

    Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. Her novel A Little Life was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize. More about Hanya Yanagihara. Hanya Yanagihara's deft depiction of heartbreak becomes a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.

  18. A Little Life: Yanagihara, Hanya: 9780804172707: Amazon.com: Books

    A Little Life. Paperback - January 26, 2016. 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. A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and ...

  19. #ARO

    A Little Life definitely touched me. This book has so many sensitive triggering subjects and is almost disturbing. Albeit I was reading it in a healthy mental state, I feel that this book is ...

  20. A Little Life ( Hanya Yanagihara) : Free Download, Borrow, and

    The million-copy bestseller, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, by the author of To Paradise and The People in the Trees, 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.

  21. A Little Life

    1511358602. ISBN-13. 978-1511358606. See all details. "All the Little Raindrops: A Novel" by Mia Sheridan for $10.39. The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. | Learn more.

  22. A Little Life: A Novel

    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 ...

  23. Buy A Little Life: The Million-Copy Bestseller Book Online at Low

    Amazon.in - Buy A Little Life: The Million-Copy Bestseller book online at best prices in India on Amazon.in. Read A Little Life: ... Report. Honey. 5.0 out of 5 stars Love it! Reviewed in India on 24 January 2020. Verified Purchase. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a huuuge book! Like, no kidding guys, it's like 800 pages and I'll be honest ...