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Published Nov 2023
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
The New York Times–bestselling, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through brings her singular voice to a story about modern life and connection
Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez's ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past.
Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another's distress. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez's new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.
"Nunez's subject is the core business of being alive: the tenuous beauty of human connection, the nature of memory, the purpose of writing, the passage of time...the result is almost arrestingly straightforward. Spare and understated and often quite funny, the experience is less like reading fiction than like eavesdropping on someone else's brain... .[The Vulnerables] itself is strangely, sweetly hopeful...Sharp—and surprisingly tender."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Episodic in nature (like much of pandemic life), the novel shuffles about in fits and starts as Nunez grapples with writer's block and the fear of getting sick, though her pacing is as swift as her wit. Once again, Nunez manages to make a story of mortality go down easy." —Publishers Weekly
"Hilarious and deeply reflective." —TIME
This information about The Vulnerables was first featured
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Photo: Marion Ettlinger
Sigrid Nunez is the author of the novels A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, and What Are You Going Through, among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. She has been the recipient of several awards, including the National Book Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her books have been translated into thirty languages. She lives in New York City.
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