A love letter to someone gone, interrupted by someone who won't leave.
The Friend
A grieving writer takes in her dead mentor's Great Dane and finds an unlikely housemate for the life she must now rebuild.
200g
Weighs the same as Camp Sandals + Sunscreen
- Lightweight
- Quiet Companion
- Fiction
Sigrid Nunez won the 2018 National Book Award for a dog story. Well, not just any dog story: a writer unexpectedly loses her lifelong friend and mentor to suicide, and inherits his grieving, traumatized, 150-pound Great Dane. It is a fiercely smart, deeply funny, and moving essay-novel about grief, writing, aging, and the strange, quiet contract of love between humans and animals. This is a slow-burn comfort read for lonely stretches, with an intimacy that makes you feel like Nunez is walking right there beside you.
Field notes
Nunez began The Friend as an eight-minute reading for a Boston University faculty event. There was no dog. Thirty pages into the expanding manuscript, she needed to decide what the dead writer's widow would ask of her narrator, and Apollo entered the story. Nunez had imagined the novel's voice as a love letter, intimate and urgent, addressed to someone no longer there. But its shifting second person sometimes addresses the dead friend, sometimes the dog, sometimes no one in particular. What began as a letter to the absent became a book about the unexpected arrival of someone still here.