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The handsome, kind-hearted William works in a restaurant and dreams of becoming an actor; the confident, humorous JB tries to make a name for himself in the art world; the well-off Malcolm works in a well-known architectural firm, but has lost his original love for architecture; and there is the introverted and enigmatic Jude, a talented assistant prosecutor. After getting acquainted with a famous university in Massachusetts, they first came to New York to make a living. They were high-spirited but penniless and drifting. As he grew older and had a successful career, the friendship spanning more than thirty years faced the greatest challenge - the elusive Jude himself. He didn't want to talk about the shadow of his past with others, and chose to harm himself again and again in loneliness. With the help of his friends, Jude's inner defenses gradually disintegrated... "I know my life is meaningful because I am a good friend." "A Small Life" is a hymn of brotherhood and an odyssey to explore the meaning of life. In friendship, what is damaged in us becomes whole again.

This book is inspired by the life experience of Daniel Gadusek, a Nobel Prize winner who was once world-famous but later disgraced. It tells the story of the young American doctor Pelina who discovered a mysterious tribe and a group of mysterious residents called "sleepwalkers" by the locals while conducting anthropological research on a certain island in the Pacific in the 1950s. After discovering that these sleepwalkers were hundreds of years old and had severely degraded minds, Pelina began to suspect that their longevity was due to eating a rare species of sea turtle. In the end, Pelina managed to prove his case by smuggling some of the turtle meat back home, and won the Nobel Prize for it. However, his discovery not only failed to fulfill the human dream of immortality, but triggered a series of terrible chain reactions, which destroyed the island and also destroyed Pelina himself...