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withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their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.