A Little Life is the perfect chronicle of our age of anxiety, providing all its attendant dramas (cutting, binges and childhood sexual abuse) as well as its solaces: friendship, drugs, travel, love affairs and interior design. Sometimes books come along that match the times.

As the New Yorker pointed out, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Emma Donoghue’s Room let the worst abuses appear off stage. How much suffering and abuse can one character believably endure? Yanagihara told the Guardian: “One of the things my editor and I did fight about is the idea of how much a reader can take,” and you’ll find it hard to find another mainstream literary fiction that equals the most egregious “misery memoir” for its plotlines.

So why has it struck such a chord? Despite being on the Booker shortlist, the US novelist’s prose is a little patchy and the plot is at times almost operatic in its hysteria. January is proving to be a very bleak month.- Sophie Robinson January 16, 2016 Snape died, Bowie died, my boiler broke and I'm in the final chapters of A Little Life. The story narrows its focus on Jude: broken, full of secrets, self-harming, slicing his calves and arms at 2am, his body a web of scar tissue. They are all, improbably, incredibly successful: JB in the art world, Malcolm as a “starchitect”, Willem as an actor and Jude as a litigator. Set in the present, A Little Life is about four young men – friends from the same college – who move to New York to chase big careers. According to Jon Michaud in the New Yorker: “Yanagihara’s novel can also drive you mad, consume you and take over your life.” He’s right: the big book of our Australian summer is as bleak and addictive as they come. My friend Tom texted, “Horrendous but there are 150+ pages of bad stuff,” and then, a week later, “I am still thinking about the book.” On Facebook, one friend told me, “IT IS SLAYING ME,” and another suggested a support group. Ever since Christmas – when the novel’s prevalence on year-end lists guaranteed its spot among my friends as a gloomy, dauntingly large stocking filler – the messages have been rolling in.

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