Book Club Monday
This week’s selection has been a difficult choice for me. I keep hearing how amazing and unlike anything ever read before, the story, A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara is, yet also how hard some parts of the story are to read. The plot goes like this….
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 readers.
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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.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. (Amazon.com)
This book is sitting in my wish list on Amazon waiting to be purchased but for some reason, I cannot pull the trigger. Not sure I can handle the parts of the abuse but I am dying to read it. If anyone has read it, please leave your comments below or in the facebook comments and tell us what you thought of the book.
Annette | 5th Jan 16
Nicole et al;
Am almost done reading it and loving it. The hard parts are pretty rough and I had to skim through the last one because I'm so attached to Jude at this point that I can't bear to hear of any more of his hellish childhood.
Totally recommend. And expect an emotional hangover to linger for a while.
Happy New Year and Happy Reading!
XO