A Little Life — Hanya Yanagihara (2015)

Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life — a 720-page novel following four friends from college through middle age, centred on the survivor of extraordinary childhood abuse — is the most controversial literary novel of the decade: praised for its emotional intensity and ambition, criticised for what some see as exploitation of trauma. It is the most talked-about American literary novel since Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and one of the most affecting.