![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The story is that a beloved writer friend has committed suicide – the book is tenderly addressed to him as ‘you’ throughout – and the unnamed narrator, also a writer, is, landed by Wife Three with his enormous Great Dane, Apollo. Let’s see if I can explain this (if I could, I’d much rather quote her entire penultimate chapter, but that would spoil the book’s great sucker punch). So-called ‘overnight sensaion’ Sigrid Nunez ![]() Clearly Sigrid Nunez is that rare beast: the kind of writer who has mastered the art of reticence and compression, who knows that it’s often the silences that speak loudest, who knows how to skirt the porous thresholds of fiction and autobiography, self-conscious metafiction and plain-spoken confession – not to mention comedy and tragedy – without falling into any of the self-indulgence or pretentious philosophising that can bedevil such high-stakes writing. And it’s also a book about grief, and the kind of love that can emerge between the living and the dead.Īll that in just a couple of hundred pages. It’s also a book about dogs, and the kind of relationship that can grow between people and animals. It’s a book that has a lot to say on the subject of friendship, and the kind of friendship that can develop between readers and writers. It’s precisely the kind of echo that this carefully wrought, hugely likeable book – marketed as a novel, but we’ll come back to that – is built around. A friend recommended The Friend, appropriately enough. ![]()
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