A small life

A Small Life is one of the most surprising, challenging, disturbing, and deeply moving books of recent decades. An epic tale of love and friendship among four young people that breaks down barriers and impacts readers. A candidate for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, it was also a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award.

When four friends from a small Massachusetts college move to New York City in search of a better life, they find themselves broke, aimless, and sustained only by their friendship and ambitions.

Willem, handsome and generous, is an aspiring actor; JB, born in Brooklyn, is a perceptive and sometimes cruel painter who seeks every means to enter the world of art; Malcolm is a frustrated architect working for a renowned firm; and the solitary, brilliant and enigmatic Jude serves as the group's gravitational center.

Over time, their relationship deepens and clouds, tinged with addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, as each comes to realize, is Jude himself, a supremely talented litigator in middle age, yet at the same time an increasingly tormented man, his mind and body marked by the scars of a mysterious childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a trauma so intense that he will not only be unable to overcome it—but one that will define his life forever.

With magnificent and brilliant prose, Hanya Yanagihara has created a tragic and transcendental hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of physical and psychological pain, and an analysis of the raw truth that permeates the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance. A Small Life is an epic about love and friendship in the 21st century that explores some of the darkest spaces fiction has ever dared to navigate, yet, in an almost improbable way, manages to break through the barriers of shadow and reach the light.