![]() Jude's suffering finds its equipoise in the decency and compassion of those who love him the book is a wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship. While A Little Life is shot through with pain, it's far from being all dark. Jude's guardedness makes him the heightened embodiment of the secret private self we all have, with our own calming rituals, mental hideaways and escape hatches. Here, Jude's ghastly history puts him in a mental universe that his friends - and readers - must work to enter. Yanagihara is fascinated by how we understand minds very different from our own. Even as the book pointedly challenges the neat, happy arc of popular redemption stories - "People don't change," Jude decides - it calls on our imaginative sympathy. As the book begins, they've moved to New York to make their fortune, and over the next 700 pages - yes, 700 - we watch them rise, lose their bearings, fall in love, slide into squabbles and wrestle with life's inevitable tragedies.īesides, Jude's condition is Yanagihara's way of exploring larger issues. There's the timorous would-be architect, Malcolm, born of a wealthy, mixed-race family and the handsome, lame Jude, a brilliant attorney addicted to cutting himself. There's the kindhearted actor, Willem, and the self-centered artist, JB, of Haitian stock. The book follows three decades in the life of four friends from a posh college. As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night. This new book is long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience. We just love tales about healing.īut how far should we trust them? That's one of the many questions raised by A Little Life, a new novel by Hanya Yanagihara, whose acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees, came from seemingly nowhere 18 months ago. How?Īmerica is hooked on stories of redemption and rebirth, be it Cheryl Strayed rediscovering herself by hiking the Pacific Trail or the late David Carr pulling himself out of the crack-house and into The New York Times. ![]() ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Perhaps the new book, like A Little Life, will get bids for a potential TV adaptation? Either way, we bet Antoni Porowski will be reading.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title A Little Life Author Hanya Yanagihara “That the novel has such scope and range and ambition, yet feels so intimate, is a testament to Hanya Yanagihara’s capacious mind, imagination, and heart,” Doubleday’s publisher and editor-in-chief Bill Thomas said in a statement. ![]() The cast of characters includes a fragile descendant of a distinguished family who prefers a poor music teacher over the suitor seeking their hand in marriage, a young Hawaiian man who is keeping secrets about himself and his father from his older and wealthier partner, and a woman who is learning to live without her powerful scientist grandfather while trying to make sense of her husband’s mysterious disappearances. According to a release, To Paradise explores the way humans long to find a place in an earthly paradise and gradually realize that it can’t exist. Her new book spans three different centuries and versions of America: 1893, when New York is part of the “Free States” 1993, when Manhattan was besieged by the AIDS epidemic and 2093, when the world faces plagues and totalitarian rule. The author’s last title, A Little Life, won the 2015 Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for both the Booker Prize and National Book Award. Hanya Yanagihara’s next novel, To Paradise, will be published by Doubleday on January 11, 2022. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture Photo by Publisher
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