Books like A Little Life
What should you read after Hanya Yanagihara’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Hanya Yanagihara
- 2015
- 720 pages
- Literary fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after A Little Life
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchTomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin
The same decades-long, non-romantic love between people who make things, minus the abyss — Zevin gives you the friendship without asking you to survive it.
- Friendship over thirty years
- Art and ambition
- Chosen family
- Far lighter and warmer
Best for art and ambitionThe Interestings
Meg Wolitzer
Six teenagers meet at an arts camp in 1974 and Wolitzer follows their talent, envy and diverging incomes for forty years. The friendship novel, without the ordeal.
- Art and ambition
- Friendship over thirty years
- New York across decades
- Sociological, less intimate
Great matchThe Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
Another orphaned boy carried through decades by people who choose him, at the same enormous length and with the same appetite for beauty and self-destruction.
- Total immersion
- Chosen family
- New York across decades
- Plot-driven, with a heist
Best for almost unbearable intimacyOn Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong
A letter from a son to a mother who cannot read it — much shorter than Yanagihara, just as raw, and better at making the pain sound like music.
- Almost unbearable intimacy
- Trauma and its aftermath
- Friendship over thirty years
- Fragmentary and non-linear
Great matchThe Death of Vivek Oji
Akwaeke Emezi
A body left on a doorstep in Nigeria, and a circle of friends assembling who Vivek actually was — chosen family and grief, in a fraction of the pages.
- Chosen family
- Almost unbearable intimacy
- Trauma and its aftermath
- Under 250 pages
Worth a look — with a warningShuggie Bain
Douglas Stuart
Stuart writes damage with the same refusal to look away, except his is a boy loving an alcoholic mother in Thatcher's Glasgow rather than a man alone.
- Trauma and its aftermath
- Almost unbearable intimacy
- Total immersion
- One childhood, not thirty years
What should you read after A Little Life?
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin — the same decades-long, non-romantic love between people who make things, minus the abyss — Zevin gives you the friendship without asking you to survive it.
If what stayed with you was art and ambition, read The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer instead: six teenagers meet at an arts camp in 1974 and Wolitzer follows their talent, envy and diverging incomes for forty years. The friendship novel, without the ordeal. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is the other strong option — another orphaned boy carried through decades by people who choose him, at the same enormous length and with the same appetite for beauty and self-destruction.
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