Paperback: When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they are 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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.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 will not only be unable to overcome - but that will define his life forever.
The 700-or-so pages of A Little Life (2015) that took Japanese-American author Hanya Yanagihara 18 months to write, open in a somewhat jaunty and recognisable manner: introducing four bright young things as they graduate college, their sights trained on big New York City careers. Christian Lorentzen, in the London Review of Books, wrote that the characters "seem like stereotypical middle-class strivers plucked out of 1950s cinema", and indeed they slip into these careers somewhat easily, becoming a successful actor, painter, architect and lawyer. But soon the novel darkens, it jars and then it appals, becoming less about the four young men and more particularly about one of them: the one who won’t tell of why he limps, why he doesn’t have relationships, why he cuts. The one who won’t tell of his ugly childhood and why he fears he will never escape its horrors.
Yanagihara should be commended for creating a book that, despite being a shattering and difficult read, became a bestseller, was shortlisted for Man Booker Prize 2015, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards, Bailey's Womens Prize for Fiction, National Book Award for Fiction and won the Kirkus Prize in Fiction.
About the author: Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist and travel writer. She grew up in Hawaii. Following her graduation from the women's college Smith College in 1995, Yanagihara moved to New York and worked for several years as a publicist. In 2007, Yanagihara began writing for Condé Nast Traveler where she became an editor before leaving in 2015 to become a deputy editor at the style magazine T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
Her first novel, The People in the Trees, based on the real-life case of the virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, was praised as one of the best novels of 2013
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