The Friend, a surprise success that won the National Book Award in 2018, is about loss, love, and literature. Although the book blurs boundaries – for instance between memoir and essay – The Friend is a novel and shows its fictionality around every bend. It would be easy to identify the first-person narrator – a nameless writer in her late 60s from New York who teaches creative writing at a university – with Sigrid Nunez, also a writer in her late 60s who lives in New York and teaches creative writing at a university. And when I saw a Harlequin Great Dane on the cover, I knew I needed to read it. Not George Saunders or Colson Whitehead, not Joan Didion or Louise Erdrich, but Sigrid Nunez. Well, The Friend is a novel (the sixth!) by a woman whose name I’d never encountered before: Sigrid Nunez. Every so often, a book comes around by an author you’ve never heard about – although you pride yourself on always following new, enticing, and award-winning publications from the U.S.
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