An oral history of A Little Life, 10 years on

In 2013, Hanya Yanagihara’s debut novel The People in the Trees, set in the 1950s and about a doctor searching for a lost tribe, was published by Atlantic Books in the UK and Doubleday in the US, sold to them by her literary agent Anna Stein. Yanagihara’s UK editor at the time, Ravi Mirchandani, recalls that the book ‘got some very good reviews both sides of the Atlantic, but didn’t sell particularly well’. 

By this time, Yanagihara was already working on a new book – A Little Life – which she wrote in 18 months, a period during which she has said that she ‘didn’t go anywhere with friends, didn’t go out at night, didn’t read the newspapers, watch TV, go to the movies or the theatre’. ‘I just sat and worked on this book,’ she said. Not even Stein knew what she was working on, until she received the manuscript in the summer of 2013. 

Anna Stein, Yanagihara’s literary agent: ‘We have a very “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationship. She knows I’m always there and interested, but the unspoken agreement is that I don’t ask her any questions, I wait for her to say, “I’ve got something”. I feel like she might’ve given A Little Life to me as a physical manuscript, and I would sit on the subway reading and crying and reading and crying.’ 

Ravi Mirchandani, Yanagihara’s UK editor: ‘At the beginning of the book there were these four recent graduates who’d moved to New York and I found myself thinking of Mary McCarthy’s The Group. I found it very readable. There was no question when Anna said, “Do you want to publish it?” “Absolutely I want to publish it.” I don’t think any of us were thinking that I was making an offer for a future bestseller.’ 

Mirchandani was ready to offer on A Little Life in January 2014, but there was an unseen spanner in the works; Atlantic’s finances led to a restructure and a number of redundancies, including Mirchandani. It would be almost nine months before he started a new job, at Pan Macmillan’s Picador imprint. 

Kate Green, publicist: ‘I joined Picador in December 2014; I think we started talking about A Little Life literally as soon as I started. Ravi pitched it with the four characters, and he just didn’t give me any kind of intro to it at all, only that he’d worked with and known Hanya for a long time and they were good friends. 

‘I don’t think I quite realised, because I read it on a Kindle, how big it was, and I just flew through it. At first I was reading it from a work point of view, of trying to pull out themes, rather than just surrendering myself to it. But the more I read it, I was drawn to it in a kind of unstoppable way. I think that’s the thing that really bonded Ravi and I when we first started working together: we were the only ones who’d properly read A Little Life. I was just like, “Ravi, can I talk to you about this?”’ 

A Little Life was released in the US on 10 March, 2015 – and reactions were mixed. Steph Cha, in the Los Angeles Times, said she ‘became so invested in the characters and their lives that I almost felt unqualified to review this book objectively’, while Janet Maslin in the New York Times called it ‘a big, emotional, trauma-packed read with a voluptuous prose style that wavers between the exquisite and the overdone’. 

Ravi Mirchandani: ‘Basically, nothing very much happened until the Americans published and the book got some tremendous reviews in the States. Not all of them were tremendous, as it’s always been a book that divided people.’  

Anna Stein: ‘There are two things that I remember really changing course, thinking, “Oh, this might work out”. One was that Twitter became a place where people were talking about books, and all of a sudden there were conversations about books that were pushing sales and changing sales.  

[The second thing is] I remember going to the London Book Fair, and [literary agent] Peter Straus coming up to me and saying, “Congratulations, you’ve got the Booker winner.”’ 

Bea Carvalho (then on the Waterstones buying team, now the retailer’s Head of Books): ‘We remember the team at Pan Mac presenting it to us and there just seemed to be a real buzz about it. It was one of those books that slowly absolutely everyone in the team – whether they were working directly on it or not – were reading. Everyone had to have an opinion and everyone had to be part of that conversation.’ 

Ravi Mirchandani: ‘Waterstones ordered 200 copies for the entire chain, which, given the days in which Waterstones might order 18 copies for the entire chain, was not a disastrous figure. But a couple of northern branches, I think the main one in Manchester and possibly Doncaster, ordered between them 120 copies. So suddenly Waterstones were paying more attention to it on the basis of reads by two individual booksellers at those particular branches.’ 

Anna Stein: ‘I’m sorry to sound so cynical, but I don’t trust the industry to necessarily recognise when something is really extraordinary. I thought A Little Life was extraordinary. I thought it was unlike anything I’d read before, unlike anything that was out, unlike any of her contemporaries. But I didn’t trust the world to necessarily see that, celebrate it, elevate it. I thought it was entirely possible that she would have her fans, but in some ways that it would just be too dark to break out further than that.’ 

Kate Green: ‘The big break that I got was Lisa O’Kelly at the Observer New Review went for a profile interview. It was just perfectly timed because Hanya was in London in June, and Tim Adams interviewed her.’  

Ravi Mirchandani: ‘Hanya came into [Pan Macmillan’s] old offices near King’s Cross to do a little proof signing party for fans of the book within the company. It was absolutely remarkable quite how many people were there for a book that hadn’t been published yet by an author who had not made that much of a mark in the UK for her first book.’ 

A few weeks before the book’s UK release, A Little Life was included on the longlist of the Booker Prize. 

Sam Leith, Booker Prize judge, 2015: ‘I think I came to it pretty fresh without many expectations, but I do, out of all very many books I read, remember it very well. When you’re reading 150 books in 150 days or thereabouts, you slightly groan when you get something that’s the size of a breeze block. And yet one of the things I remember about it was that it whipped by, you read it at extraordinary pace and it was just a massively absorbing, massively involving reading experience. When it came to the judging, I think most of us actually were very impressed by it.’ 

The book was released in the UK on August 13, 2015. Much like in the US, the book sparked intense debates, online, in reviews and in person. 

Kate Green: ‘I think going with the shortlist in the autumn, that really, really helped to keep A Little Life going. There was also the National Book Awards in the States, which was at exactly the same time. So it was quite a busy autumn.’ 

Into the following year, A Little Life would continue to be read, debated and celebrated. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize 2016, and won the fiction book of the year award at the British Book Awards. 

Over subsequent years, it’s never faded, and has in fact become a cultural phenomenon, with tote bags and t-shirts sporting the four characters’ names still spotted on book fans. There’s been no shortage of celebrity endorsement; Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski spoke about the book in a major Vulture interview in 2018, while Dua Lipa wrote for the Booker Prize in 2023 on why it’s one of her favourite books. 

The book found a new fanbase via TikTok during the Covid-19 pandemic, with readers posting tear-filled videos, and in 2023, an English-language version of the play was staged in London, starring James Norton. This year marks the book’s 10th anniversary. 

Kate Green: ‘One of the reasons why it’s just kept on going is because it is a simple sell, word-of-mouth wise. I never wanted to tell someone how they were going to feel when they read it, but it feels like it’s just got more amped up, with TikTok and people crying, whereas when we first published it, it was more like, “this is just going to be an experience that you won’t forget”.’ 

Sam Leith: ‘It was quite unusual for a Booker book. Not to say that other Booker novels don’t get you emotionally, but this is talked about so often in terms of “it made me cry here”. I think it has got this great emotional clout, whether we decide that’s meretricious or earned.’ 

Bea Carvalho: ‘It’s not just about the literary merit or the sentence by sentence, beautiful language or the plot or anything. It is about the reader’s reaction to it.’  

Kate Green: ‘I think there are timeless themes in there about friendship and found family and how you understand yourself and you make sense of the world.’ 

Cathy Rentzenbrink: ‘Of course, it’s a difficult book in lots of ways. I’m not sure I had this theory then, but I do now, I think that almost the better the quality of the literature, the more I am able as a reader to consume difficult truths about humanity.’ 

Ravi Mirchandani: ‘It has become, I believe, a rite of passage into adulthood novel.’ 

Anna Stein: ‘I think it’s part of the canon. I think its status is established.’