Yanagihara’s most impressive trick is the way she glides from scenes filled with those terrifying hyenas to moments of epiphany. ‘Wasn’t it a miracle to have survived the unsurvivable? Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely? Wasn’t this house, this beauty, this comfort, this life a miracle?’ A Little Life devotes itself to answering those questions, and is, in its own dark way, a miracle.
