Arts
US novelist Hanya Yanagihara presents 'A Little Life' onstage at Foyles, in conversation with author and Associate Editor of The Bookseller Cathy Rentzenbrink. After enthralling readers and reviewers alike with her debut 'The People in the Trees', Yanagihara's new novel spans the decades-long relationships across a group of four college graduates who move to New York to pursue their various careers—aspiring actor Willem; struggling architect Malcolm; JB, a painter making his way in the art world; and Jude. Withdrawn, enigmatic, crippled by an accident of which he doesn't speak, Jude is haunted, damaged from a childhood kept hidden from his closest friends. Increasingly successful in his career as a lawyer, yet increasingly broken by a past that comes to define him, Jude's position as the dazzling black hole at the centre of the group will come to send shockwaves through the characters—and through the reader too. Still buzzing from its release in the US earlier in the year, this is a profoundly moving work that will leave its mark on the reader and the industry for years to come. Yanagihara unpicks this contemporary literary triumph onstage at Foyles in conversation with Rentzenbrink.