A Little Life
Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss.
Why read it
Four college friends move to New York to make their lives, but the novel narrows to one of them: Jude, a brilliant, damaged man whose past is so terrible he cannot speak of it. To love him, his friends must accept that some wounds may never heal.
Yanagihara's immense novel is an unflinching study of trauma, friendship, and the limits of love, following Jude across decades as the abuse of his childhood shadows every success. It is a deliberately extreme book about whether devotion can save a person, and about the courage it takes simply to keep living.
Hanya Yanagihara's second novel was published in 2015, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, and became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Its unrelenting subject matter made it one of the most passionately debated literary novels of the decade.
- 01
The unspeakable past
You confront how trauma resists language, as Jude's history is revealed slowly and only partially even to those closest to him.
- 02
Chosen family
The bond among Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm asks what obligations love creates, and where its power ends.
- 03
The body that remembers
Jude's self-harm and physical suffering embody a past that his mind cannot outrun, however much he achieves.
- 04
Love's limits
What awaits is the novel's hardest question: whether being loved completely is ever enough to undo what was done to you.
Willem and Jude's deepening relationship, and the fragile, hard-won periods of happiness Jude allows himself to feel.
The gradual disclosure of Brother Luke and the monastery, the origin of the abuse that defines Jude's inner life.
