They talk about films and paintings – and, indeed, create them – and these boys luxuriate in their shared passions and new discoveries. These four friends are all from starkly different backgrounds, and they navigate their new lives in New York city just as they navigate each other. I was fully absorbed, and – laughing when the characters laughed, crying when they cried – I ultimately realised the stakes were as high for me as they were for the characters.Ī Little Life is a book about art and creativity, aspiration and achievement, family and friendship, and identity and discovery. We become inextricably entangled, and by the end I found myself reminiscing on the beginning along with the characters. Yanagihara sets her novel apart in her masterfully zig-zagging timeline: we’re moved between people, dipping in and out of their lives we’re moved between years, collecting details from the past that inform the future, and vice versa. A Little Life spans Jude’s entire life, beginning in these early college days and ending with his death as many bildungsroman (coming-of-age) novels do.

As the novel progresses, though, we get closer and closer to Jude, who becomes our protagonist. The novel opens soon after their graduation from an unnamed (but prestigious) university in New England, and the beginning of the friends’ adulthoods and careers.

Prior to this, my lockdown reading had been speedy – almost frantic – as I tried to consume as much as I could in this unprecedented pause, and to escape the unpleasant truth of the world unfolding on the news.Ī Little Life tracks the rises and falls of four friends in New York City. It’s almost one month since I started reading A Little Life, the Man Booker Prize finalist by Hanya Yanagihara published in 2015.

It's a little life