Author(s): Hanya Yanagihara

Fiction

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 light. Truly an amazement--and a great gift for its publisher. 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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.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, 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.

This is an epic, epic work of fiction - possibly the best-written book I've ever read, and certainly one of the most stunning. I spent most of July immersed, and two weeks later I am still left breathless by its impact. While the writing itself is not hard, I found the content emotionally draining; the casual, constant (although very seldom graphic) acts of abuse, mostly self-inflicted, but also mental, sexual and physical. I did at times skip paragraphs, or pages. The story initially follows four friends fresh out of a prestigious New England college: confident, brash JB, an artist making ends meet working on the reception desk of an art magazine; confused, sensitive Malcolm, a brilliant architect struggling with his sexuality and race; beautiful, sweet Willem, a waiter and actor grieving the loss of his brother; and Jude, lawyer, mathematician, musician, hiding a dark and tortured past. However it soon becomes clear that JB, Malcolm and even Willem are support players to the larger horror that is Jude's story. Comparisons have been made to Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, and I can see how the two stories are similar, but where reading The Goldfinch was on occasion like slogging through a muddy paddock, A Little Life is like rafting a river in full flood, on acid. It's one hell of a ride but so absolutely worthwhile. - Lucy

“What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.”- A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. The irony is that this is not a book that makes things prettier. This book is the best I’ve read so far this year and one of the best that I’ve ever read. I can’t do it justice in a short review, so this one is going to be longer than usual. The short version is that it’s thoroughly engrossing, shattering, epic in every sense, and beyond what I thought literature could do. However, there are certain things that you need to consider before picking it up because it is a very difficult book to read. I heard this novel reviewed a couple of weeks before it was released in the States and just knew that I had to get my hands on it. This particular reviewer, a dedicated fan of Donna Tartt, said that A Little Life was better than The Goldfinch, and, having just finished it, I wholeheartedly agree. Any review of this book has to start with a warning though. A Little Life deals with some of the most difficult sides of humanity. Yanagihara confronts every type of abuse in this novel: psychological, physical, sexual, drug, and (particularly) self-inflicted. It is not an easy read, nor one that anyone should enter into lightly. I lost sleep over this book, both thinking about it and compulsively reading late into the night. Even when I wasn’t actually reading I was with these characters. The story itself follows four college friends living in New York in the 21st Century (there are no references to real-world events that would allow for a more accurate time period). The novel spans decades of these characters’ lives, beginning in their early twenties, and also contains flashbacks. One of the four characters, Jude, is the enigma of the group. They know very little about his childhood, but guess that something traumatic must have happened to him. Jude also has an injury that he never talks about, but that causes him a great deal of pain. All four friends are high-flyers professionally (lawyer, actor, architect, and artist) and we see the progression of their careers as well as their loves and losses. The thing that makes this book is the characterisation. It doesn’t take long to become completely engaged in the characters’ stories, particularly Jude’s. We see how Jude perceives himself, as well as how others see him, which is fascinating as well as heart-breaking. These characters are so well fleshed-out, so believable and so real. They all have their flaws and we see them doing things that are hurtful and damaging, intentionally and accidentally. Yanagihara does this to the extent that you are guaranteed to feel a deep emotional connection to most, if not all of the main characters. A Little Life has been compared to The Goldfinch and there are many comparable aspects. The tone is similar, particularly at the beginning, and it is set in New York at a similar time. It also follows a very well-written protagonist. The main similarities as far as I can see are way that the characters are depicted with such detail and understanding, the attachment you feel with them, and the fact that there are very few female characters (something that would annoy me in other writers, but for some reason I make an exception for Tartt and Yanagihara). In other ways it is very different from The Goldfinch. I know that a lot of people found that Tartt’s story really dragged in the middle, but that really isn’t the case with Yanagihara. Although there were times when I had to set it down temporarily because it was too intense - it is a page-turner. - Holly