A Little Life

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2015

Shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction 2016

Winner of Fiction of the Year at the British Book Awards 2016

Finalist for the National Book Awards 2015

The million-copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance. When 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. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.

Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome – but that will define his life for ever.

Part of the Picador Collection, a new series showcasing the best of modern literature.

About the Author

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.