A Little Life

Hypnotic…immersive…. At its heart A Little Life is a fairy tale that pits good against evil, love against viciousness, hope against hopelessness. The cruelty of the life Ms. Yanagihara describes is trumped only by the tenacity with which she searches for an answer.

It’s an 800-page novel that unfolds so naturally. You feel like you’re living with these characters; they don’t seem like imagined people. An extraordinary reading experience.

The enthralling and completely immersive story of one man’s unyielding pain…a stunning work of fiction.

Once she has you, Yanagihara is not going to let you go… Yanagihara…contains multitudes. She seems able to imagine anything… A Little Life…is, in its own dark way, a miracle.

The first must-read novel of the year. A Little Life is the most devastating but satisfying novel published so far this year. Finishing its 720 pages is like finishing one of the doorstop novels of 19th-century Russia: you feel worn out but wide awake.

There’s nothing little about this book: not its length or its pleasures or its sometimes-wince-inducing tortures. Jude’s story is cathartic in the truest sense; it’ll wring you out like a sauna.

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.

One of the pleasures of fiction is how suddenly a brilliant writer can alter the literary landscape… Ms. Yanagihara’s…new book…announces her…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.

It’s not hyperbole to call this novel a masterwork—if anything that word is simply just too little for it.

Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff.

Exquisite, unsettling…an examination of the depths of human cruelty, counterbalanced by the restorative powers of friendship.

Difficult to put it down, even in the midst of sobbing…a transformative experience, not soon forgotten.

The triumph of A Little Life’s many pages is significant: It wraps us so thoroughly in a character’s life that his trauma, his struggles, his griefs come to seem as familiar and inescapable as our own. There’s no one way to experience loss, abuse, or the effects of trauma, of course, but the vividness of Jude’s character and experiences makes the pain almost tangible, the fall-out more comprehensible. It’s a monument of empathy, and that alone makes this novel wondrous.