I've been recommending A Little Life to people for five years and I've been wrong each time about who is ready for it. The novel is 800 pages and approximately the most difficult reading experience available in literary fiction — not because it's dense or experimental but because it asks you to sit with suffering that has no resolution.

Jude, the central character, was abused in ways that the novel describes with a clinical specificity that is deliberately uncomfortable. The novel is asking whether a person can be saved by love when the damage is structural rather than situational. The answer it gives is no, not fully, but that love is still worth offering.

I don't recommend it without caveats anymore. I say: this is devastating and there is no catharsis and you should think about whether you want to read it. Some people say yes and come back having had an experience that mattered to them. Some say no and that is also correct.