Lorsque quatre camarades de classe d'une petite université du Massachusetts déménagent à New York pour faire leur chemin, ils sont fauchés, à la dérive et soutenus uniquement par leur amitié et leur ambition... Au fil des décennies, leurs relations s'approfondissent et s'assombrissent, teintées de dépendance, succès et fierté. Pourtant, leur plus grand défi, chacun se rend compte, est [leur centre de gravité] Jude, ... à la quarantaine, un plaideur terriblement talentueux mais un homme de plus en plus brisé, son esprit et son corps marqués par une enfance indescriptible, et hanté par ce qu'il craint, c'est un traumatisme qu'il sera non seulement incapable de surmonter, mais qui définira sa vie pour toujours. "--

'I promise you more patience, more gratitude. I promise you less vanity, less selfishness, less complaining, less fear. I promise you. You just have to survive.' A Little Life follows the complex relationships of four college friends in New York City: Willem, an actor; Malcolm, an architect; JB, an artist; and, at the centre of their group, Jude, a lawyer. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, changed by ambition, addiction and pride. Yet their greatest challenge is Jude himself, whose secrets - and shame - define not just his own life, but that of his friends as well. A bruising and beautiful story of love, the limits of human endurance, and the tyranny of memory, Hanya Yanagihara's novel A Little Life has sold over a million copies and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction. The stage adaptation - conceived by Ivo van Hove, and adapted by Koen Tachelet, van Hove and Yanagihara herself - was first performed in a Dutch-language production at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 2018, before transferring to New York in 2022. This English-language version opened in London's West End in 2023, directed by Ivo van Hove and with a cast led by James Norton as Jude.