A Little Life
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By Hanya Yanagihara (2016)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE 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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I have thought carefully about whether to give this four or five stars and I am settling on four, for this reason: Yanagihara's accumulation of trauma crosses from harrowing into something closer to operatic, and there are passages in the second half where I felt manipulated rather than moved. That is a meaningful distinction. What I cannot dispute is that Jude St Francis is one of the most haunting characters in contemporary fiction and that the friendship at the novel's centre is rendered with rare delicacy. Four stars as a novel; perhaps five as an experience.