A Little Life: The Million-Copy Bestseller

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Winner of Fiction of the Year at the British Book AwardsShortlisted for the Booker PrizeShortlisted for the Women's PrizeFinalist for the US National Book Award for FictionWhen four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. Malcolm was the only one of the four of them who lived at home, and as JB liked to say, if he had Malcolm’s home, he would live at home too.

She can’t even imagine that a man (Willem) doesn’t need a woman to quench his sexual needs—he has a solution readily at hand. Well,” JB said now, pulling the plate of mushrooms toward him with the tines of his fork, “I’d say you could both stay with me, but I think you’d fucking hate it. 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.

A Little Life is Jude's story and it's his sorrow that colours this devastating, exhausting, strangely exhilarating novel. Some of the technologies we use are necessary for critical functions like security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and to make the site work correctly for browsing and transactions. He was a tall man, but he had a small, gophery, pockmarked face that made him appear feral and untrustworthy.

And over and over and over the doctor, Andy: he fails every duty of care, everything that physicians stand for, believe in, dedicate their lives to—he’s there only to enable. Ezra was an artist, a bad one, but he didn’t need to be good because, as JB liked to remind them, he would never have to work in his entire life. The story begins with four college friends moving to New York City to begin their careers: architect Malcolm, artist JB, actor Willem, and lawyer Jude. The stage adaptation – conceived by Ivo van Hove, and adapted by Koen Tachelet, van Hove and Yanagihara herself – was first performed in a Dutch-language production at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 2018, before transferring to New York in 2022.The previous Friday he had lured them over with the promise of pizza and beer to help him braid, but after many hours of tedious work, it became clear that there was no pizza and beer forthcoming, and they had left, a little irritated but not terribly surprised. The depth of Jude’s suffering and the affluence of his later life have led some people to question the ‘realism’ of the story.