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
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:
