A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.
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NEC's view
A Little Life is among our favorite novels. It is a beautiful, raw, and unflinching story that follows the lives of a group of college friends almost in their entirety. What makes it extraordinary is its attention to the mundane as much as the monumental, tracing the rhythms of friendship, work, intimacy, and survival over decades.
The novel is profoundly character-driven, and we found ourselves caring for these people in ways few novels have managed. In particular, Jude and Willem stayed with us long after we closed the pages, their struggles, tenderness, and entanglements unfolding with a kind of inescapable emotional gravity.
This novel reshaped how we think about love, pain, and the quiet weight of a life. It has our heart.
