The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

Published 2018 · 212 pages

A writer in New York loses her closest friend and mentor to suicide, and inherits the one thing nobody else will take: his enormous, grieving Great Dane. Her rent-controlled apartment doesn't allow dogs. She takes him anyway. What follows is a short, sharp novel about mourning, about the people we love who choose to leave, and about what it means to keep going with a 180-pound reminder of them asleep on your bed. Winner of the 2018 National Book Award.