A Little Life

The million-copy bestseller, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

By: Hanya Yanagihara

Narrated by: Matt Bomer

Matt Bomer's heart-rending narration in this new audiobook edition offers a fresh and poignant listening experience of Hanya Yanagihara's timeless modern classic. Perfect if you're an A Little Life fan or a new listener.

'I'm not exaggerating when I say this novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship. It's one of those books that stays with you forever' – Dua Lipa

The million-copy bestseller, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, by the author of To Paradise, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance.

Winner of Fiction of the Year at the British Book Awards
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize
Finalist for the US National Book Award for Fiction

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. 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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.

Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. 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.

'Yanagihara takes you so deeply into the lives and minds of these characters that you struggle to leave them behind' – The Times

Read by Golden Globe winner and star of Fellow Travellers, Matt Bomer.

'Matt Bomer’s narration brings a steady and thoughtful presence to an emotionally intense novel . . . His ability to balance the novel’s dark themes with its moments of warmth ensures a compelling listening experience' – AudioFile Magazine

Critic reviews

A singularly profound and moving work . . . 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

A book unlike any other . . . A devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch's, a few sizes larger

Exquisite . . . The book shifts from a generational portrait to something darker and more tender: an examination of the depths of human cruelty, counterbalanced by the restorative powers of friendship

[A] wholly immersive unforgettable read . . . You won't stop reading. And it's a novel that changes you

Utterly compelling . . . quite an extraordinary novel. It is impossible to put down . . . And it is almost impossible to forget

Hypnotic . . . An intimate, operatic friendship between four men

A Little Life is unlike anything else out there. Over the top, beyond the pale and quite simply unforgettable

Piercing . . . [Yanagihara is] an author with the talent to interrogate the basest and most beautiful extremes of human behaviour with sustained, bruising intensity

Capacious and consuming . . . Immersive

Beautiful

Remarkable. . . . 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

Astonishing

Deeply moving . . . A wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship

Affecting and transcendent

WOW!

All I can say is, Hanya, you are beyond evil. You reaped my heart out and threw it away so far I will never find it. I hope you’re happy

To love knowing it may very well just end

This was an amazing journey sad yet filled with love and yet it all ends but wow thank you for a great book and a beautiful story!❤️

Moving

This book makes you think about friendship what it can give you how it can save you heal you carry you. It reminds us that the world is cruel but our stories can still lead us to find good friends who can give us a new life , a new story

The unyielding tragedy of the story,

I loved and hated the book. The book is beautifully written and well structured. The reader has a most wonderful voice for tragedy. But I resented the fact that the book was so unyielding dark and there was just too much suffering. If it had been based on something factual, I would have been ready to suffer with the protagonist. But the fact that it is fiction - the author’s graphic depictions seemed self indulgent and manipulative.

Heartbreaking

I am forever changed by this story and the characters. That people are capable of so much hurt and simultaneously so much love, both comforts and terrifies me.