Here's my "Coming Soon to a Book Store Near You" pick for today. What do you think?
A Little Life; Hanya Yanagihara
Doubleday - March - 2015
(Description)
Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement—and a great gift for its publisher.
When four classmates 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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.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.
In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.
I'm reading this one right now and, though I'm only 15% through (it's SO long!), I'm loving it. I'm getting more and more invested in the characters and the writing is spot on about life.
ReplyDeleteThe book cover seems to depict the story line well. The synopsis makes me think this one may be too sad for me. I think this would make a great book club selection.
ReplyDeleteMighty impressive sounding.
ReplyDeleteThis book is on my wishlist.
ReplyDeleteWow, this sounds good! I hope you enjoy it, Diane.
ReplyDeleteThat cover makes me think of the well known photo from the Dust Bowl. The book sounds good.
ReplyDeleteThis is a new title for me and one I might like. I'll be watching for the reviews.
ReplyDeleteNew to me so I am very glad I read this review
ReplyDeleteMy goodness, the cover alone alludes to some serious trauma for this poor man. Yet, these kind of books intrigue me. I guess I've been drawn to novels of a deep kind of angst lately, as if I'm getting out some inner tensions of my own.
ReplyDeletep.s. I thought the author may have been Asian from his name, but I guess not.