A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

$7.99

A Little Life

  • By: Hanya Yanagihara
  • Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
  • Length: 32 hrs and 51 mins
  • Categories: Literature & Fiction

Publisher's Summary

A novel of extraordinary intelligence and heart, a masterful depiction of heartbreak and a dark and haunting examination of the tyranny of experience and memory. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015.

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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.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 forever.

©2015 Hanya Yanagihara (P)2015 Pan Macmillan Publishers Ltd

Customer Reviews

1-5 of 1 review

  • RCF

    Bloated and sentimental

    Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

    I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone seeking something that gets to the heart of male relationships, as promised, as this is so clearly written by a woman who is imagining what men feel.

    Any additional comments?

    At 34 hours in length, this book is about 20 hours too long. The editor in me was mentally slashing it down to a more meaningful and succinct length. There is a touch of the precocious adolescent about the writing — there is talent in there for sure, but the overblown descriptive style is so laboured, so indulgent, that it veers into the unlikely and ultimately, unnecessary.

    Too long, too sentimental and frankly too extreme. The abject treatment of Jude is utterly excessive, whilst the trite imaginings of his and his friends’ successful adult lives is utterly fanciful. None of these characters, though drawn out in agonising details, feel like real people.

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    11 people found this helpful

    February 7, 2016

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