![]() ![]() It is Jude’s story-the traumas of his hopelessly benighted childhood and the insidious ways that they continue their assault on his mind and body–around which the vast bulk of Yanagihara’s 700-plus page novel so effortlessly turns. He is so protective of his inner life that even his three closest friends cannot claim to know him well. And then there is Jude, exquisitely beautiful and partially disabled by a mysterious, long-ago accident. Malcolm Irvine, who was born to wealthy, interracial parents on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, cannot decide if he is straight or gay and pursues a career in architecture to impress his self-made father. The gay only-son of Haitian immigrants, Jean-Baptiste Marion, known to his friends as J.B., focuses his implacable self-loathing on breaking into the art world. Willem Ragnarsson, the handsome and emotionally starved child of Wyoming ranchers, waits tables while auditioning for plays. ![]() The novel opens on a close-knit set of friends from an elite New England college who have settled in New York City to chase their dreams. What begins as an atmospheric bildungsroman set in a mythically ahistorical New York City morphs by slow degrees into a harrowing meditation on otherness and the redemptive possibilities of survival and friendship. ![]() Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life, has become one of the most talked about books of 2015 and with good reason. ![]()
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