Sigrid Nunez
2019
When a woman unexpectedly loses a lifelong friend and mentor to suicide, she reluctantly agrees to take in his traumatized, bereft dog. A massive, arthritic Great Dane, he creates havoc in her tiny Manhattan apartment and threatens her rent-stabilized lease — but also provides unexpected solace. The Friend is both a meditation on friendship and loss and a celebration of the joy and healing power of the human-canine bond. The Friend is the winner of the 2018 National Book Award for fiction and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.
Sigrid Nunez is the author of seven novels, including Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, and For Rouenna. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Nunez has been the recipient of the Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, four Pushcart Prizes, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She lives in New York City.
“In crystalline prose, Nunez creates an impressively controlled portrait of the ‘exhaustion of mourning.’” —The New Yorker. “A beautiful book … crammed with a world of insight into death, grief, art, and love.” —Wall Street Journal.
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