A Little Life

This exclusive 10th anniversary edition of A Little Life features artwork by acclaimed artists RF. Alvarez and Linus Borgo, painted in response to the book, as well as a Q&A with Hanya Yanagihara.

JB, Jude, Malcolm and Willem.
Four young men move to New York broke, adrift and buoyed only by friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem; the sardonic painter JB; Malcolm, a frustrated architect; and Jude, brilliant and enigmatic – their centre of gravity.

Review

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 book unlike any other . . . A devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch's, a few sizes larger ― The Guardian

Exquisite . . . The book shifts from a generational portrait to something darker and more tender: an examination of the depths of human cruelty, counterbalanced by the restorative powers of friendship ― The New Yorker

[A] wholly immersive unforgettable read . . . You won't stop reading. And it's a novel that changes you ― Evening Standard

Utterly compelling . . . quite an extraordinary novel. It is impossible to put down . . . And it is almost impossible to forget ― Daily Express

Hypnotic . . . An intimate, operatic friendship between four men ― The Economist

A Little Life is unlike anything else out there. Over the top, beyond the pale and quite simply unforgettable ― The Independent

Piercing . . . [Yanagihara is] an author with the talent to interrogate the basest and most beautiful extremes of human behaviour with sustained, bruising intensity ― The Times Literary Supplement

Capacious and consuming . . . Immersive ― The Boston Globe

Beautiful ― Los Angeles TImes

Remarkable. . . . 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 ― The Wall Street Journal

Astonishing ― The Atlantic

Deeply moving . . . A wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship ― NPR

Affecting and transcendent ― The Washington Post