About the author
Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist and magazine editor. Her fiction is known for long timescales, intense friendships, extreme suffering, and characters whose social and professional success cannot erase private histories.
A Little Life follows four friends in New York but gradually centres Jude, a lawyer living with chronic pain and trauma. The novel's length allows care, damage, work, and dependency to accumulate across decades rather than resolve in one revelation.
Where to start
Start with A Little Life if you are prepared for its sustained treatment of abuse and self-harm; To Paradise offers three different American narratives on an even broader scale.
