Meet the author | Sigird Nunez
Sigrid Nunez has published eight novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, The Friend which won the National Book Award 2018 and, most recently, What Are You Going Through?. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Tin House, The Believer and newyorker.com. Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature.
Sigrid’s honours and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. The Friend won the 2018 National Book Award. She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. In spring, 2019, she will be visiting writer at Syracuse University. Sigrid has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country. She lives in New York City.
Discover Sigrid Nunez’s extraordinary work
Out now:
Now a Pedro Almodóvar film - THE ROOM NEXT DOOR - starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore
'I was totally overwhelmed by this extraordinary novel. A total joy - and laugh-out-loud funny' DEBORAH MOGGACH
The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of THE FRIEND brings her singular voice to a story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship.
The woman at the heart of this extraordinary novel finds that everyone she meets has a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience for their experiences. And so she tries to pay attention, to imagine and listen to what those around her are going through. But then an old friend makes an extraordinary request and draws her into an intense and transformative experience of her own.
'I just adore Sigrid Nunez' PAULA HAWKINS
'Brilliant. I loved it as much as The Friend' SUSIE STEINER
'When I open one of [Sigrid Nunez's] novels, I almost always know immediately: This is where I want to be ... As good as The Friend, if not better' NEW YORK TIMES
'A true pleasure to read, a novel bursting with wit, warmth, and human empathy' INDEPENDENT
'Brilliant ... The narrative control of this novel simply dazzles' SPECTATOR
A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog - NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING NAOMI WATTS
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST 100 BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
WINNER OF THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
'A true delight: I genuinely fear I won't read a better novel this year' FINANCIAL TIMES
'Loved this. A funny, moving examination of love, grief, and the uniqueness of dogs' GRAHAM NORTON
'Delicious' SUNDAY TIMES 100 BEST SUMMER READS
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.
Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unravelling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Very, very clever. Mature. Entertaining. Eminently readable and re-readable. Absolutely delightful' IRISH TIMES
'I loved it . . . It's one of my favourite books and it moved me' WHOOPI GOLDBERG
'A perfect novel . . . It's my favorite kind of masterpiece - one you can put into anyone's hand' EMMA STRAUB
A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 * A Financial Times 2018 Best Book: Critics Pick * A Buzzfeed Best Book of 2018 * A Bustle Best Fiction Book of 2018 * An NPR Best Book of 2018
The paths of two women from different walks of life intersect amid counterculture of the 1960s in this haunting and provocative novel from the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend
It is Columbia University, 1968. Ann Drayton and Georgette George meet as roommates on the first night. Ann is rich and radical; Georgette is leery and introverted, a child of the very poverty and strife her new friend finds so noble. The two are drawn together by their differences; two years later, after a violent fight, they part ways. When, in 1976, Ann is convicted of killing a New York cop, Georgette comes back to their shared history in search of an explanation. She finds a riddle of a life, shaped by influences more sinister and complex than any of the writ-large sixties movements. She realises, too, how much their early encounter has determined her own path and why, after all this time, as she tells us, 'I have never stopped thinking about her'.
'A brilliant, dazzling, daring novel' Boston Globe
'A subtle and profoundly moving novel about friendship, romantic idealism and shame' O, The Oprah Magazine
'An unflinching examination of justice, race and political idealism that brings to mind Philip Roth's American Pastoral and the tenacious intelligence of Nadine Gordimer' New York Times
From the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, the moving and eerily relevant novel that imagines the aftermath of a flu pandemic as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy uncertain of his destiny.
In an America devastated by a flu pandemic, orphaned thirteen-year-old C ole finds safety and stability with an evangelical pastor and his wife. Happiness becomes disquiet as he realises the cost at which this peace comes, and the extent to which it challenges everything he knows.
Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness, blending a deeply affecting portrait of one young boy's transformation with a profound meditation on belief, heroism, and the true meaning of salvation.
'A tale of an American near-apocalypse that ... reads beautifully, at time joyously, and makes one reconsider the ordering of our world' Gary Shteyngart
'Not only timely and thought-provoking but also generous in its understanding of human nature. When the apocalypse comes, I want Nunez in my lifeboat' Vanity Fair
'Nunez's writing is gorgeously spare, and she gets the life and the lingo of a teenage boy just right.... A gorgeously strange novel' Boston Globe
'A satisfying, provocative and very plausible novel' Abraham Verghese, New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
'A wise and richly humane coming-of-age novel' O Magazine
Coming soon:
From Sigrid Nunez, the National Book Award-winning and bestselling author of The Friend, comes this mesmerising story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.
'A pleasure from the first page to the last' JONATHAN FRANZEN
***With an introduction by Susan Choi***
A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother, who meet in postwar Germany and settle in New York City. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, the narrator escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet-these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.
'A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
