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Sigrid Nunez

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8 min read

Our age bandAdult
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4.1 · 8,813 Amazon ratings
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Our review

The Friend

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez Review: An Acerbic, Tender Elegy with a Great Dane

by Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez's The Friend (Riverhead, 2018) follows an unnamed novelist who inherits Apollo, her dead mentor's Great Dane, after his suicide. The 2018 National Book Award winner and NYT bestseller turns grief into something acerbic, funny, and unsentimental.

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Our age band: Adultsuicide of a central character — the mentor's death by suicide is the premise and is discussed throughout · candid discussion of student-teacher relationships and literary-world exploitation

LuvemBooks Verdict

Best for

Readers of literary fiction who like their novels thoughtful, talkative, and a little severe — and, unmistakably, anyone who has loved a dog, plus book clubs that enjoy dividing over big questions of suicide, loyalty, art, and obligation.

Worth it if

It's worth reading if you'll trade narrative drive for a compact, unsentimental meditation on grief and the writing life that finds its emotional center in a bereaved Great Dane.

Skip if

Skip it if you want plot momentum, a conventional arc, or warmth on demand — the digressive shop talk about writers, mentors, and MFA culture can feel hermetic, and the cool, aphoristic tone holds emotion at arm's length for much of the book.

The New York Times reported that The Friend won the 2018 National Book Award for fiction to euphoric reviews hailing it as a subtle, unassuming masterpiece, calling it an acerbic but often poignant exploration of love, friendship, death, grief, art, and literature. Wikipedia's critical-reception summary cites Critics McAlpin praising Nunez for turning a potentially mawkish story into a penetrating, moving meditation, while the publisher's collected notices on Penguin Random House include praise from Publishers Weekly, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

Sources: The New York Times, Wikipedia, Penguin Random House
4.1from 8,813 Amazon ratings— reader ratings, not a LuvemBooks score

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Sigrid Nunez's The Friend follows an unnamed novelist who inherits Apollo, her dead mentor's aging Great Dane, after his suicide, and addresses her grief directly to the lost friend in a voice that is acerbic, funny, and quietly devastating. The 2018 National Book Award winner and NYT bestseller is for readers of thoughtful, talkative literary fiction — and unmistakably for anyone who has loved a dog — while readers wanting plot momentum, warmth on demand, or an escape from literary-world shop talk should look elsewhere.
Is it worth reading?
Yes, with a clear-eyed caveat. It won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction, became a New York Times bestseller, and placed at number 68 on the New York Times' 2024 list of the 100 best books of the 21st century — a reputation LuvemBooks finds earned. The verdict is that it is austere, funny, and quietly devastating, but its essayistic structure and cool, aphoristic tone mean readers wanting narrative momentum or a conventional emotional arc should know what they are picking up.
Similar books
Nunez's own earlier novel The Last of Her Kind is the natural next step for readers who want more of her voice. For the same blend of formal experiment and grief, Max Porter's Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Jenny Offill's compact, aphoristic Dept. of Speculation are close cousins. Among titles in our catalogue, Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! shares the interest in art, loss, and what remains after death, while Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day offers another restrained first-person meditation on loyalty and a life examined too late.
Who should read this?
Readers of literary fiction who like their novels thoughtful, talkative, and a little severe — and, unmistakably, anyone who has loved a dog, since the human-animal bond lands even for readers indifferent to the literary-world satire. It is also a strong book club pick: short, and genuinely divisive in productive ways on suicide, loyalty, art, and obligation. Readers who want plot, pace, or warmth on demand should look elsewhere.
Tell me about the adaptation
The novel has been adapted into a film directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, with Naomi Watts starring as the narrator. The adaptation extends the book's reach well beyond its original literary readership, though the novel's distinctive form — a one-sided address to the dead, full of essayistic digression — is inherently a challenge to translate to the screen, which makes the book the richer starting point.
Is it a good book club pick?
Yes — it is nearly an ideal one. The book is short, so no one is buried in homework, and it raises genuine, unresolved questions about suicide, loyalty, art, and obligation to the dead. Critically, it divides opinion in productive ways: some readers find the essayistic digressions and cool tone distancing while others find them bracing, and that split fuels exactly the kind of argument a good discussion needs.
Where to start with Sigrid Nunez?
The Friend is actually the natural starting point — it is the novel that reached by far the largest readership, and Nunez has said she was surprised by the scale of the response since her earlier work never found so many readers. From there, readers can go back to earlier novels such as A Feather on the Breath of God or The Last of Her Kind, forward to The Vulnerables, or sideways to Sempre Susan, her memoir about Susan Sontag.
Summarize this book

Summarize this book

An unnamed novelist and writing teacher loses her closest friend and mentor — a celebrated, charismatic, deeply flawed older writer — to suicide, and is pressed into adopting Apollo, his enormous, aging Great Dane, despite a small apartment where dogs are not permitted. The novel unfolds as a one-sided address to the dead man, moving between the practical problem of the dog, memories of the friendship, and sharp miniature essays on the literary life, while Apollo — grieving, refusing to eat, taking up more space than the room allows — becomes the book's emotional center of gravity.

Follow up

What happens with the dog, Apollo?
How does the mentor die?
Is it plot-driven?

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Our Review

We review the evidence: published critics, reader verdicts and BookTube reviews, gathered and weighed with AI assistance and edited by LuvemBooks, rather than one reader's first-hand take.

A National Book Award winner that earns its reputation: austere, funny, and quietly devastating on grief, writing, and the consolations of a very large dog.

What the Book Is

The Friend is a novel by Sigrid Nunez, published by Riverhead Books in 2018 (the edition under review is the 2019 paperback reprint). Its narrator is an unnamed novelist and writing teacher whose closest friend and mentor — a celebrated, charismatic, deeply flawed older writer — has died by suicide.
In the aftermath, she is pressed into adopting Apollo, the dead man's enormous, aging Great Dane, despite living in a small apartment where dogs are not permitted. What follows is less a conventional plot than an extended address: the narrator speaks to her lost friend about his life, his wives, his students, the ethics of what he did and what writers do, while the dog — grieving in his own way, refusing to eat, taking up more space than the room allows — becomes the book's emotional center of gravity.
Reviewers, in their profile of Nunez, described the novel as an acerbic but often poignant exploration of love, friendship, death, grief, art, and literature, and that is an accurate map of its territory.

Its Place and Its Reception

The novel's standing is unusually well documented. It won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction, became a New York Times bestseller, and was a finalist for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
In 2024 it placed at number 68 on the New York Times list of the 100 best books of the 21st century, and it has been adapted into a film directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, starring Naomi Watts as the narrator. Critical response at publication was strong: the Times reported euphoric reviews hailing the book as a subtle, unassuming masterpiece, and the publisher's collected notices — from Library Journal, Electric Lit, and others — consistently single out the same qualities, its dark humor and its refusal of sentimentality.
Nunez, the author of nine novels including A Feather on the Breath of God and The Vulnerables, and of the memoir Sempre Susan about Susan Sontag, has said she was surprised by the scale of the response, since her earlier work had never reached so many readers.

What It Does Well

The book's great formal gamble is its voice. It is built as a kind of one-sided conversation with the dead, moving freely between the practical problem of the dog, memories of the friendship, and sharp, unsentimental essays-in-miniature on the literary life — student-teacher relationships, the marketplace for fiction, the ego costs of the vocation.
The Times noted the novel's unflinching aim at a status-obsessed literary world, and that acid is what keeps the grief material from turning soft. The premise — a woman and a bereaved dog learning to live together — is one that could easily curdle into mawkishness, and critics across the board credited Nunez with steering it instead toward something penetrating and unsentimental, a meditation in which the animal is a genuine presence rather than a device.
It is also a genuinely compact book: a short, taut novel by design, which suits its elegiac register.
Interior page with book title and synopsis describing a story about a woman and her inherited dog.
Interior page with book title and synopsis describing a story about a woman and her inherited dog.

Where Readers Push Back

The same qualities that admirers praise are the ones that will lose some readers. The Friend is essayistic and digressive rather than plot-driven; long stretches are given over to literary gossip, quotations, and argument about writing itself, and readers who come for the dog story will find the dog shares the stage with a great deal of shop talk about the publishing world.
Its unnamed narrator and insider milieu — novelists, mentors, MFA classrooms — can read as hermetic to anyone outside that world, and the cool, aphoristic tone that keeps the book unsentimental also keeps it at a certain emotional arm's length for much of its length. None of this is a flaw of execution so much as a matter of design; but design has a cost, and readers wanting narrative momentum or a conventional arc should know what they are picking up.

Who It Is For

The Friend is for readers of literary fiction who like their novels thoughtful, talkative, and a little severe — and, unmistakably, for anyone who has loved a dog, since the human-animal bond at its core lands even for readers indifferent to its literary-world satire. It suits book clubs: it is short, raises genuine questions about suicide, loyalty, art, and obligation, and divides opinion in productive ways.
Readers who want plot, pace, or warmth on demand should look elsewhere; readers who want a novel that thinks hard about what remains after a death — and finds an answer with four legs and an inconvenient appetite for floor space — will understand exactly why the literary world embraced it.

Sources & Further Reading

The key facts and claims in this review are grounded in the retrieved, verified sources listed below.

  1. Cited in this review
  2. 1
    The Friend (novel) - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org

  3. 2
    The Friend: A Novel : EcoLit Books

    ecolitbooks.com

  4. Further reading
  5. 3
    With ‘The Friend,’ Sigrid Nunez Becomes an Overnight Literary Sensation, 23 Years and Eight Books Later - The New York Times

    nytimes.com

  6. 4
    The Friend | Sigrid Nunez

    sigridnunez.com

  7. 5
    Summary and Reviews of The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

    bookbrowse.com

  8. 6
    5-Minute Book Review: The Friend by Sigrid Nunez - Eve-Marie Reads

    eve-marie.com

  9. 7
    All Book Marks reviews for The Friend by Sigrid Nunez Book Marks

    bookmarks.reviews

  10. 8
    Reviews - The Friend: A Novel | The StoryGraph

    app.thestorygraph.com

  11. 9
    The Friend (National Book Award Winner) by Sigrid Nunez: 9780735219458 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

    penguinrandomhouse.com

Age & Reading Level

Our age band

Adult

Our age band groups books for browsing; it isn't an age a review gave.

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Content to know about

suicide of a central character — the mentor's death by suicide is the premise and is discussed throughout
candid discussion of student-teacher relationships and literary-world exploitation

Best for: Adults — literary fiction built around a suicide, with essayistic arguments about the ethics of student-teacher relationships

Skip if you want plot momentum, a conventional arc, or warmth on demand rather than essayistic literary-world talk.

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More by Sigrid Nunez

On Amazon

The Last of Her Kind

Sigrid Nunez

Same author, different register: two women who meet in 1968 and are driven apart by their opposing relationships to class and radicalism, with Nunez's cool intelligence intact.

Two women meet as Columbia freshmen in 1968, one hoping college will let her escape her underprivileged background, the other, born into the ruling class, embracing a radicalism that ends in a murder conviction. Narrated years later by the one left behind, it turns the era's idealism into a private account of loyalty, envy, and what we owe the people we love. It suits readers who want Nunez's precision applied to a bigger, more conventionally plotted canvas.

If you liked The Friend

In our catalogue

Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar

A grieving, funny, addicted poet circles death and meaning in inventive, digressive prose, a close tonal sibling to Nunez's essayistic grief novel on this list.

In our catalogue

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

A butler reviews a life of service and missed chances with immaculate restraint; the same discipline that makes Nunez's grief ache without ever pleading.

On Amazon

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

Max Porter

Grief arrives as a huge, rude crow in a bereaved household; fragmentary, funny, and unsentimental in the same register as Nunez's meditation on loss.

On Amazon

Dept. of Speculation

Jenny Offill

An unnamed wife narrates a fracturing marriage in short, aphoristic bursts, the same wry, fragmentary intimacy Nunez uses to think through love and loss.

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