A Little Life
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 3, 2017 8:23 PM | Last Updated: March 9, 2017
Hanya Yanagihara
A stunning novel from one of the most exciting new voices in literature, A Little Life follows four college classmates — broke, adrift and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition — as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success and pride, deepen and darken over the decades, the men are held together by their unshakable love for the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love and friendship in the 21st century, A Little Life is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. (From Doubleday Canada)
From the book
Malcolm was the only one of the four of them who lived at home, and as JB liked to say, if he had Malcolm's home, he would live at home too. It wasn't as if Malcolm's house was particularly grand — it was, in fact, creaky and ill-kept, and Willem had once gotten a splinter simply by running his hand up its banister — but it was large: a real Upper East Side town house. Malcolm's sister, Flora, who was three years older than him, had moved out of the basement apartment recently, and Jude had taken her place as a short-term solution: Eventually, Malcolm's parents would want to reclaim the unit to convert it into offices for his mother's literary agency, which meant Jude (who was finding the flight of stairs that led down to it too difficult to navigate anyway) had to look for his own apartment.
From A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara ©2015. Published by Doubleday Canada.