It's one of those books that stays with you forever.' - Dua Lipa In A Little Life, it's life's evanescent blessings that maybe, but only maybe, can save you.'I'm not exaggerating when I say this novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship. With her sensitivity to everything from the emotional nuance to the play of light inside a subway car, Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff.

Jude's suffering finds its equipoise in the decency and compassion of those who love him the book is a wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship. While A Little Life is shot through with pain, it's far from being all dark. Jude's guardedness makes him the heightened embodiment of the secret private self we all have, with our own calming rituals, mental hideaways and escape hatches. Here, Jude's ghastly history puts him in a mental universe that his friends - and readers - must work to enter. Yanagihara is fascinated by how we understand minds very different from our own. Even as the book pointedly challenges the neat, happy arc of popular redemption stories - 'People don't change,' Jude decides - it calls on our imaginative sympathy. As the book begins, they've moved to New York to make their fortune, and over the next 700 pages - yes, 700 - we watch them rise, lose their bearings, fall in love, slide into squabbles and wrestle with life's inevitable tragedies.īesides, Jude's condition is Yanagihara's way of exploring larger issues. There's the timorous would-be architect, Malcolm, born of a wealthy, mixed-race family and the handsome, lame Jude, a brilliant attorney addicted to cutting himself. There's the kindhearted actor, Willem, and the self-centered artist, JB, of Haitian stock. The book follows three decades in the life of four friends from a posh college. As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night. This new book is long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience. We just love tales about healing.īut how far should we trust them? That's one of the many questions raised by A Little Life, a new novel by Hanya Yanagihara, whose acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees, came from seemingly nowhere 18 months ago. How?Īmerica is hooked on stories of redemption and rebirth, be it Cheryl Strayed rediscovering herself by hiking the Pacific Trail or the late David Carr pulling himself out of the crack-house and into The New York Times. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title A Little Life Author Hanya Yanagihara

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