A novel of extraordinary intelligence and heart, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark and haunting examination of the tyranny of experience and memory.
Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.
A singularly profound and moving work . . . It's not often that you
read a book of this length and find yourself thinking "I wish it
was longer" but Yanagihara takes you so deeply into the lives and
minds of these characters that you struggle to leave them behind. *
The Times *
A Little Life makes for near-hypnotically compelling
reading, a vivid, hyperreal portrait of human existence that
demands intense emotional investment . . . An astonishing
achievement: a novel of grand drama and sentiment, but it's a
canvas Yanagihara has painted with delicate, subtle brushstrokes. *
Independent *
One of the pleasures of fiction is how suddenly a brilliant writer
can alter the literary landscape . . . Ms. Yanagihara's immense new
book . . . announces her, as decisively as a second work can, as a
major American novelist. Here is an epic study of trauma and
friendship written with such intelligence and depth of perception
that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other
novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be
measured. * Wall Street Journal *
How often is a novel so deeply disturbing that you might find
yourself weeping, and yet so revelatory about human kindness that
you might also feel touched by grace? Yanagihara's astonishing and
unsettling second novel . . . plumbs the rich inner lives of all of
her characters... You don't just care deeply about all these lives.
Thanks to the author's exquisite skill, you feel as if you are
living them . . . A Little Life is about the unimaginable
cruelty of human beings, the savage things done to a child and his
lifelong struggle to overcome the damage. Its pages are soaked with
grief, but it's also about the bottomless human capacity for love
and endurance . . . It's not hyperbole to call this novel a
masterwork - if anything that word is simply just too little for it
* San Francisco Chronicle *
Martin Amis once asked, "Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness
really swing on the page?" And the surprising answer is that Hanya
Yanagihara has: counterintuitively, the most moving parts of "A
Little Life" are not its most brutal but its tenderest ones,
moments when Jude receives kindness and support from his friends .
. . A Little Life feels elemental, irreducible-and, dark and
disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it * New Yorker *
Utterly compelling . . . quite an extraordinary novel. It is
impossible to put down . . . And it is almost impossible to forget.
* Daily Express *
A darkly beautiful tale of love and friendship... I've read a lot
of emotionally taxing books in my time, but A Little Life .
. . is the only one I've read as an adult that's left me sobbing. I
became so invested in the characters and their lives that I almost
felt unqualified to review this book objectively . . . There are
truths here that are almost too much to bear - that hope is a
qualified thing, that even love, no matter how pure and freely
given, is not always enough. This book made me realize how merciful
most fiction really is, even at its darkest, and it's a testament
to Yanagihara's ability that she can take such ugly material and
make it beautiful * Los Angeles Times *
Capacious and consuming . . . Boast[s] a scale and immersive power
to rival the recent epics of Donna Tartt and Elizabeth Gilbert . .
. Alternately devastating and draining, A Little Life floats
all sorts of troubling questions about the responsibility of the
individual to those nearest and dearest and the sometime futility
of playing brother's keeper. Those questions, accompanied by
Yanagihara's exquisitely imagined characters, will shadow your
dreamscapes * Boston Globe *
Astonishing . . . tender, torturous and achingly alive to the
undeniable pain that can scar a life. * Psychologies *
A Little Life asks serious questions about humanism and
euthanasia and psychiatry and any number of the partis pris of
modern western life. It's Entourage directed by Bergman;
it's the great 90s novel a quarter of a century too late; it's a
devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch's, a
few sizes larger. -- Alex Preston * Observer *
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