A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

Four college friends move to New York with nothing but ambition and each other: Willem, a kind, handsome aspiring actor; JB, a sharp-tongued painter chasing a place in the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect; and Jude, brilliant, enigmatic, and the quiet centre of gravity the other three orbit around without quite understanding why. Over several decades, their friendships deepen and complicate under the weight of success, addiction and pride - but the book's real subject is Jude himself, a formidably talented lawyer whose body and mind carry the scars of a childhood he's never told anyone about, and a level of trauma he's convinced will define the rest of his life no matter what he achieves. Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life became one of the most talked-about literary novels of the past decade - shortlisted for the Booker Prize, devastatingly long, and notorious for how completely it wrecks readers emotionally by the final chapters. It's not a comfortable read, and it doesn't try to be; instead it asks how much suffering a person, and a friendship, can actually hold. Essential for readers of ambitious literary fiction, fans of character studies stretched across decades, and anyone prepared for one of the most emotionally intense novels in contemporary fiction - best approached with some awareness that it engages closely with themes of abuse and self-harm.