2018NBA 2018
The Friend
Sigrid Nunez · b. 1951 · United States
Why it matters
An unnamed writer inherits her mentor's enormous, grieving Great Dane after his suicide, the dog's presence in her small apartment prompting a fragmented meditation on loss and literature. Nunez's National Book Award winner is essayistic grief at its most exact.
At a glance
autobiographical fictionpsychological novelessay
Difficulty 4/10slow pace212 pagesFragmented, essayistic structure asks readers to follow associative digression rather than plot.
Deep dive
Why a novel about a suicide spends most of its pages talking about a dog, and what that displacement is actually doing.
