Four friends and classmates move to New York after their graduation to build their lives – penniless, lost, with only their friendship and ambitions to support them:

The noble, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a painter from Brooklyn trying to conquer the art world; Malcolm, an architect at a major firm; and Jude – the brilliant, enigmatic Jude.

As the decades pass, their relationships deepen but also darken, colored by addiction, success, and pride. However, the greatest challenge, they all realize, is Jude himself, now an incredibly charismatic lawyer but a man increasingly broken, with his body and mind marked by the unspeakable terrors of his childhood – haunted by traumas he fears not only he will never overcome but that will define him forever.

With rich and luminous prose, Yanagihara writes a tragic, transcendent hymn to love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, the tyranny of memory, and the limits of human endurance.

• Kirkus Prize for fiction
• Fiction Book of The Year at the British Book Industry Awards
• Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award 2015

This book establishes Yanagihara as one of the most important contemporary American writers.  Wall Street Journal

Completely gripping. Romantic and at times heartbreaking, A Little Life kept me awake for many nights. Edmund White, author

Martin Amis once wondered: "Who else besides Tolstoy managed to make happiness leap off the pages?" The stunning answer to this question is Hanya Yanagihara. Despite instinctive reactions, the most moving moments of the book are not its harsh scenes, but when Jude receives the kindness and support of his friends… A Little Life is experienced as a universal experience and, despite its darkness and unsettling nature, it possesses genuine beauty.
New Yorker

How often does a novel manage to upset you to tears, while at the same time revealing the essence of human kindness and making you feel touched by divine grace? Yanagihara in this novel manages to present the rich inner lives of all her characters. And it’s not just that you care about the development of all these lives; it’s that thanks to her unique ability, you feel as if you are living them yourself… A novel about the unspeakable cruelty of human beings, the atrocities a child endures, and his struggle throughout his life to overcome them. Pages soaked in sorrow but at the same time dedicated to our unlimited capacity to love and endure… It is no exaggeration to call this work a masterpiece – perhaps the word is even too small to describe it. San Francisco Chronicle