A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Summary
A warning first, because this book requires one. A Little Life contains sustained and explicit depiction of childhood sexual abuse, self harm and suicide, returned to across more than seven hundred pages. It is not incidental and it does not stop. Readers with any history in that territory should approach carefully or not at all.
The setup is deceptively ordinary. Four friends leave a Massachusetts college for New York: Willem an actor, JB a painter, Malcolm an architect, and Jude, a brilliant litigator who will not discuss where he came from. The novel gradually abandons the other three and becomes entirely Jude's, moving between his present and a past disclosed in pieces.
Yanagihara writes friendship better than almost anyone, and the sections about ordinary adult love between men who are not lovers are extraordinarily moving. Willem's steadiness and JB's selfishness are drawn with real care. The book's defenders are right that nothing else reads like it.
Its critics are also right. The suffering is relentless to the point of unreality, the New York is a fairy tale where money never binds, and the novel seems to want the reader broken rather than persuaded. It is the most divisive literary novel of its decade and both camps have read it correctly.
Do not start it casually and do not treat finishing it as an obligation. Readers who love it tend to describe it as the most affecting book they have ever read, and readers who abandon it at page three hundred are making a reasonable decision rather than failing a test.
Historical Context & Significance
A Little Life was published in March 2015 and came close to everything without taking any of it. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction the same year, and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2016. It won the Kirkus Prize and none of the majors.
That pattern is exactly what this list exists to record. A novel can be the most argued about book of its year, become a bestseller, and still be the one the juries admired and did not choose, and the disagreement it provoked is the likeliest reason: a book this divisive is hard to build a consensus around, and prize juries decide by consensus.
Its readership has only grown since. It sustains an unusually devoted following online, and a 2023 London stage adaptation drew mixed reviews and an Olivier Award nomination for James Norton as Jude.