A Little Life
Four friends across thirty years, and one of them carrying a childhood that does not repair. Long and deliberately hard.
A witness to human suffering pushed to its limits, drawn in extraordinary detail by incantatory prose.
Hanya Yanagihara follows four college friends, an actor, an architect, an artist and a lawyer, from their twenties in New York into middle age. The gravity of the narrative settles on Jude, the lawyer, whose early years hold an abuse he will not name and mostly cannot speak. Around him the others build careers and devotion, and the story tests what any of it can reach.
What holds clinical attention is the fidelity with which the novel tracks the body and the internal logic of a person organised around early harm: the shame that reads care as threat, the self-punishment that survives decades of being loved, the way attachment offers rescue yet never quite delivers it. Yanagihara declines the consoling shape in which love repairs what was done.
The result is a long, difficult study of whether injuries set before language can be undone, and of what that question asks of the people who stay.
About the author
Hanya Yanagihara
Hanya Yanagihara, born in 1974, is an American novelist and magazine editor. She grew up in Hawaii and now lives in New York City, where she serves as editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. She is best known for her novels, including The People in the Trees, To Paradise, and A Little Life, a long and widely read book that follows four friends across decades. Her fiction often examines suffering, care, and the bonds between people.
Details
- 2015
- Picador
- Picador
- 752
- 9781529077216