A Little Life

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

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 readers.

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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.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

Author: Hanya Yanagihara
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Published: 03/10/2015
Pages: 736
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.25lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.50w x 1.80d
ISBN: 9780385539258


Award: Kirkus Prize - Winner
Award: Man Booker Prize - Nominee
Award: National Book Awards - Finalist
Award: Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence - Finalist
Award: ALA Notable Books - Winner


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/17/2014
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2015
Library Journal 01/01/2015 pg. 97
Booklist 02/15/2015 pg. 32
Shelf Awareness 03/13/2015
Entertainment Weekly 03/20/2015 pg. 102
New York Times Book Review 04/05/2015 pg. 9
New York Times Book Review 04/12/2015 pg. 26
New Yorker (The) 05/25/2015 pg. 73
Entertainment Weekly 11/06/2015 pg. 62
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/02/2015 pg. 30
New York Times Book Review 12/03/2015 pg. 18
Kirkus Best Fiction 11/15/2015 pg. 46
Entertainment Weekly 12/04/2015 pg. 46
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/06/2015 pg. 26
Shelf Awareness 12/11/2015
People Weekly 12/21/2015 pg. 58
Booklist Editors Choice/Adult 01/01/2016 pg. 9

About the Author
Hanya Yanagihara is the author of"The People in the Trees."She lives in New York City."