Four friends and college classmates move to New York after their graduation to build their lives - broke, lost, with only their friendship and ambitions as their support: the noble, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a painter from Brooklyn trying to conquer the art world; Malcolm, an architect at a significant firm; and Jude - the brilliant, enigmatic Jude.
As the decades pass, their relationships deepen but also darken, colored by addiction, success, and pride. However, the greatest challenge, they all realize, is Jude himself, now an incredibly gifted lawyer but also a man increasingly broken, with his body and mind marked by the unspeakable horrors of his childhood - haunted by traumas he fears he will not only never overcome but that will define him forever.
With rich and brilliant prose, Yanagihara writes a tragic, transcendent hymn to love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, the tyranny of memory, and the limits of human endurance.