Now, only cutting keeps the memories at bay, quiets the “hyenas” that forever lurk at the edges of his mind, and wards off his feeling of being too dirty and damaged to deserve the love of his friends and the success he eventually enjoys as renowned litigator. On and on, Jude’s trials went, until the harrowing ordeal that left his body permanently broken. He eventually escaped to the care of a trusted adult who subjected him to years of sexual servitude. Jude was abandoned in a trash bin as an infant and spent his childhood in a monastery with monks who treated his precociousness with a regime of increasingly brutal punishments. What Jude cannot articulate to his closest friend comes to the reader in a series of flashbacks to a decidedly gothic childhood. The cutting becomes a source of anger and confusion for Willem, who cannot fathom the impulse to self-harm, and Jude’s silence on the matter offers nothing in the way of consolation. Jude insists it was an accident, but his personal physician confides to Willem that his friend has a long history of secret cutting, one that occasionally escalates to the point of disaster. Our first real glimpse into Jude’s inner turmoil comes when Willem awakes one night in the apartment they share to find him bleeding from a deep cut on his arm. It is Jude’s story-the traumas of his hopelessly benighted childhood and the insidious ways that they continue their assault on his mind and body–around which the vast bulk of Yanagihara’s 700-plus page novel so effortlessly turns.

He is so protective of his inner life that even his three closest friends cannot claim to know him well. And then there is Jude, exquisitely beautiful and partially disabled by a mysterious, long-ago accident.

Malcolm Irvine, who was born to wealthy, interracial parents on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, cannot decide if he is straight or gay and pursues a career in architecture to impress his self-made father. The gay only-son of Haitian immigrants, Jean-Baptiste Marion, known to his friends as J.B., focuses his implacable self-loathing on breaking into the art world. Willem Ragnarsson, the handsome and emotionally starved child of Wyoming ranchers, waits tables while auditioning for plays. The novel opens on a close-knit set of friends from an elite New England college who have settled in New York City to chase their dreams. What begins as an atmospheric bildungsroman set in a mythically ahistorical New York City morphs by slow degrees into a harrowing meditation on otherness and the redemptive possibilities of survival and friendship. Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life, has become one of the most talked about books of 2015 and with good reason.

A little life description