Why am I passionate about this?
I’m passionate about this theme because I grew up inside the kind of silence most people never see—the kind shaped by responsibility, fear, love, and the need to stay strong before you’re old enough to understand why. I’ve lived through the quiet wounds, the invisible burdens, and the unspoken grief that shaped every part of me. Stories like these make people like me feel less alone. They remind us that survival has its own language, and that the things we carry silently are worth naming. I write about quiet pain because it’s the world I came from, and the world I learned to rise out of.
Zarah's book list on hidden trauma and the lives we never speak about
Why Zarah loves this book
I have never read a book that captured quiet pain the way A Little Life does.
I loved it because it understood the kind of wounds people carry silently—the ones that don’t heal cleanly, the ones we learn to live around. I saw pieces of myself in the way Jude moves through the world: careful, watchful, loving deeply even when he feels unworthy of being loved.
This book didn’t give me comfort; it gave me recognition. It reminded me that survival isn’t loud or heroic—it’s slow, painful, and often invisible. I couldn’t stop reading because it felt like someone finally wrote down the things I thought no one saw.
It stayed with me long after I closed the pages.
15 authors picked A Little Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2015
Shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction 2016
Winner of Fiction Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2016
Finalist for the US National Book Awards 2015
The million copy bestseller, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance.
When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted,…
