A Little Life

A Little Life follows four college friends who move to New York to make their way: JB, a sharp and ambitious painter; Malcolm, an architect frustrated at his firm; Willem, a kind, aspiring actor; and Jude, a brilliant, secretive litigator whose past and whose body are marked by wounds he will not explain. Over the decades that follow, their friendships deepen, their careers rise, and their lives orbit ever more closely around Jude, the enigmatic center of their group.

At its heart, the novel is the story of Jude: of the unspeakable abuse and trauma of his childhood, of his enduring shame and self-loathing, and of the love—romantic, fraternal, and paternal—that the people around him offer as they try to save a man who cannot quite believe he deserves saving. Hanya Yanagihara writes with an intimacy that makes the reader complicit in both the tenderness and the devastation.

Sweeping, immersive, and profoundly painful, A Little Life is an unflinching examination of friendship, trauma, and the limits of human repair. It is also, by wide reputation, one of the most emotionally harrowing novels of its generation—beautiful and brutal in equal measure.