![]() Yanagihara’s private life is as constrained as her cultural knowledge is broad. Fashion and design spreads are now steeped in art history, and the magazine publishes essays that are surprising, and sometimes esoteric: an analysis of avant-garde flower arrangers a rigorous survey of artists, from Japan to South Africa, who are “reimagining the animal figurine.” She took over T four years ago, and, thanks to her magpie intelligence, it has become a vibrant cabinet of curiosities. She has spent a lot of time travelling and has an unusually international aesthetic: she is as comfortable speaking about ceramicists in Sendai as about conceptual artists in New York. ![]() Through her editorial work, Yanagihara, who is forty-seven, has become conversant with hundreds of creative people and their work. She is the editor-in-chief of T, the style supplement to the Times, which publishes articles and photo-essays about fashion, travel, art, and design. Independent Here is an epic study of trauma and friendship written with such intelligence and depth of perception that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be measured.Hanya Yanagihara wears her black hair pulled back with a razor-sharp center part, and she prefers to dress in black, especially in clothes by Dries Van Noten, the cerebral Belgian designer. An astonishing achievement: a novel of grand drama and sentiment, but it's a canvas Yanagihara has painted with delicate, subtle brushstrokes. The Times A Little Life makes for near-hypnotically compelling reading, a vivid, hyperreal portrait of human existence that demands intense emotional investment. It's not often that you read a book of this length and find yourself thinking "I wish it was longer" but Yanagihara takes you so deeply into the lives and minds of these characters that you struggle to leave them behind. 'Yanagihara takes you so deeply into the lives and minds of these characters that you struggle to leave them behind.' – The TimesĪ singularly profound and moving work. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome – but that will define his life forever. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. Winner of Fiction of the Year at the British Book Awardsįinalist for the US National Book Award for Fiction The million-copy bestseller, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, by the author of To Paradise and The People in the Trees, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance. It's one of those books that stays with you forever.' - Dua Lipa 'I'm not exaggerating when I say this novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship.
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