Four college friends—Willem, JB, Malcolm, and Jude—build careers and share an apartment in New York, and the novel widens over decades into the backstory of Jude St. Francis, a lawyer whose ruined legs, scarred body, and secret cutting trace back to abuse by Brother Luke at a monastery and years of exploitation before he was taken in by his law professor Harold.
Books mentioned in A Little Life (15)
The Odyssey by Homer: “he had been preparing to shoot The Odyssey and was rereading it and The Iliad, neither of which he had looked at since he was a freshman in college”
Iliad by Homer: “he had been preparing to shoot The Odyssey and was rereading it and The Iliad...”
Common Sense by Thomas Paine: “he slips away and wedges the disc...between two books—a battered copy of Common Sense and a frayed edition of White Noise—on a low shelf”
White Noise by Don DeLillo: “between two books—a battered copy of Common Sense and a frayed edition of White Noise—on a low shelf”
Dubliners by James Joyce: “finally he chose a copy of Dubliners: it was thin enough for him to grip, pliable enough to crack against a face”
Emma by Jane Austen: “He found a copy of Emma, which he had been reading in class at the college before he ran away”
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: “With Brother Michael, he read Great Expectations...”
The Bostonians by Henry James: “Brother Matthew had an original clothbound edition of The Bostonians...”
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien: “Harold read The Hobbit to him, which he had never read...”
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: “including a copy of The Leopard on whose flyleaf was scrawled: 'Property of Laurence V.'”
The Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum: “a third-grade book report, written in Willem's careful cursive, on The Wizard of Oz”
The Tempest by William Shakespeare: “watching as she sketched designs for a production of The Tempest...”
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams: “His senior year, he got a role in the school's production of The Glass Menagerie”
Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov: “he'd start shooting his first project since he returned from Sri Lanka, an adaptation of Uncle Vanya”
A Bright Room Called Day by Tony Kushner: “he had once almost, almost booked the second lead in the Public Theater production of A Bright Room Called Day”