A Little Life

A Little Life is a novel by the American writer Hanya Yanagihara, published in 2015. It was written over the course of about eighteen months, and it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award.

The book is set mostly in New York and follows four men who became friends at college. Jude is a lawyer whose abilities are matched by a past he will not speak about; Willem is an actor working his way up; JB is a painter whose career takes off; Malcolm is an architect from a comfortable family. Their twenties are spent in shared apartments, cheap restaurants and the small rivalries of people who are close enough to be careless. As the years pass, the novel's attention settles on Jude and on the relationships that gather around him, including his friendship with Willem and his dealings with an older man who took an interest in him when he was young.

The book moves back and forth in time, and it uses different perspectives and a set of passages narrated in the first person by one of its older characters, so the same life is seen from several angles. It deals directly with child abuse, self-harm, addiction and depression, and it belongs to the tradition of the long American social novel while refusing to keep its subject at a distance.