Where do I even start with this? It's disturbing, heartfelt, emotional, yet intelligent, and probably one of the most difficult to read books that I have ever picked up. For the first few pages, I seriously considered not pushing on with it, but then slowly I felt myself getting sucked in to the narrative, and once I was fully immersed in the story there was no getting out. At seven hundred and twenty closely typed pages, this book is a commitment, and in some ways this reflects the life of the characters. Central to everything is Jude St Francis, who was found in a rubbish bag as a new born baby and then raised in an orphanage run by Catholic monks. His experiences as a child are nothing short of horrific, but somehow this is not just another one of those misery novels where all suffering is gratuitous and written in the cause of making money. Hanya Yanagihara delves so deeply into the psychological impact of long-term trauma that I feel certain that the ...