book review what are you going through

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Book Reviews

Attachment brings joy, and inevitably, loss in 'what are you going through'.

Heller McAlpin

Sigrid Nunez is on a roll. She's tapped into a smart, wry voice which feels right for our times, as do her concerns with friendship, empathy, loss, and loneliness.

In 2018, Nunez garnered well-deserved raves — and a National Book Award — for her sixth novel, The Friend, about a woman mourning the suicide of a fellow writer, who finds surprising solace after agreeing to take in his bereft, arthritic Great Dane. What Are You Going Through is a worthy followup — a companion piece, if you will — that considers the comforts and emotional risks of a different sort of companionship.

The narrator, another unmarried, unnamed, childless writer, agrees to a more difficult, startling request from an old but not particularly close writer friend, who is dying of cancer: To help her die. Specifically, to go away with her and stay until she is ready to take the euthanasia pills that will end her life. "I will not go out in mortifying anguish," the friend insists, adding, "Cancer can't get me if I get it first."

It takes Nunez's meandering novel a while to get to this arrangement, whose dramatic potential is of course intense. That's in part because she is less interested in drama than in empathy.

Like the writer-narrator in Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy — which this loose-limbed narrative resembles at times — Nunez's narrator is a magpie for others' stories. "Women's stories are often sad stories," she writes. She threads some of these woeful tales through her book, along with references to a few of the saddest stories literature and film have to offer. There are encounters with a cantankerous shut-in neighbor whom she visits as a favor to the woman's worried son, and even a cat's sorry saga about his tortured life before his adoption. Ford Maddox Ford's novel The Good Soldier and Yasujiro Ozu's movie Tokyo Story set the bar for pathos. Her point? "No matter how sad, a beautifully told story lifts you up."

'The Friend' Is No Shaggy Dog Story

Author interviews, sigrid nunez wants to know: 'what are you going through'.

As in The Friend, there's a metafictional aspect to this profoundly literary novel: Nunez again writes of the challenges of being a writer, including concerns about getting things right, and the morality of milking others' experiences.

In her epigraph to The Friend , a quote by Nicholson Baker, Nunez flagged one of her central concerns as a writer: "The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?" What Are You Going Through takes its epigraph (and uncannily apt title for these times) from French philosopher Simone Weil, who wrote, "The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, 'What are you going through?'" Nunez points out that the question is even more potent in French: " Quel est ton tourment?"

The simple act of making such an inquiry demonstrates a measure of humanity. Nunez's narrator asserts that there are "no uninteresting human lives, and that you'd discover this if you were willing to sit and listen to people." But, she adds wryly, "sometimes you had to be willing to sit for a very long time."

Unlike many notable works about mortality, such as Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Wit , Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a dying English professor, What Are You Going Through is less about the nitty-gritty of dying than about the difficulty of accurately capturing the swarm of feelings surrounding death. "No matter how hard we try to put the most important things into words, it is always like toe-dancing in clogs," Nunez writes. Her narrator fears that "language would end up falsifying everything."

The marvel of this novel is that it encompasses so much sadness yet is not grim. For one thing, the narrator's friend is the type of person who deflects difficulty with sardonic humor. She remarks that she could use a dummies' guide to dying, and jokes that there were "enough bones of contention" between her and her daughter "to make a whole skeleton." Moved to tears when the narrator agrees to help her, she texts, "I promise to make it as much fun as possible."

The two women do have fun. They watch old movies, read fairy tales, and laugh at the slapstick absurdities of their situation. But they also connect more deeply than they had expected. As in The Friend, this newfound attachment — to a dying person rather than a dog this time — brings joy, but also creates a foothold for loss and grief. "Soon it will end, this fairy tale. This saddest time that has also been one of the happiest times in my life will pass," the narrator acknowledges soberly. "And I'll be alone."

Despite its serpentine path, What Are You Going Through explicitly aims for and pretty much manages to hit all of William Faulkner's prescribed goalposts for writers: "love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." Nunez has written another deeply humane reminder of the great solace of both companionship and literature.

• print archive
• digital archive
• book review

[types field='book-title'][/types]  [types field='book-author'][/types]

Riverhead Books, 2020

Contributor Bio

Jessica vestuto, more online by jessica vestuto.

• America Was Hard to Find

What Are You Going Through

By sigrid nunez, reviewed by jessica vestuto.

Trying to describe a death while it’s happening is like trying to make a bed while lying in it. It’s an awkward and often doomed endeavor without clean lines—that is, unless you are Sigrid Nunez. Her 2018 National Book Award-winning novel, The Friend , was about the aftermath of a death; her highly anticipated follow-up novel, What Are You Going Through , masterfully depicts a death as it is happening. The book is a transitive space, a verb between two nouns, a going through.

What is the narrator going through? For most of the novel, in typical Nunez fashion, she seems less an actual person than a sounding board for other people’s sad stories. A neighbor describes his elderly mother’s dwindling sanity. A jaded ectomorph at the gym laments the inevitability of aging. A shelter cat, in one Kafkaesque scene, shares his sad plight. Each story centers on loss, and through Nunez’s spare prose, each story feels overheard and fleeting, as though the narrator is listening to an intimate conversation through thin walls. Reading these stories, you slip into a state of reverence without realizing it; you find yourself breathing more quietly, partly out of respect, partly out of fear you might scare them away.

Slowly the narrator’s own sad story is revealed: a close friend is dying of cancer. The novel follows the conversation between the friends as the dying woman considers both how her life has been and how it will end. “Dying is a role we play like any other role in life,” the narrator says, and at first the friend plays the role admirably, analyzing the painful and awkward process of dying thoughtfully and even humorously. The narrator is the ideal audience for the performance: she doesn’t pity her friend, nor does she ignore the diagnosis. Instead, she listens devotedly to her friend’s thoughts on death and occasionally offers her own. The pair complement each other well—the friend exceedingly blunt, the narrator exceedingly passive—and their conversations evolve into a comfortable and familiar rhythm. They’re the kind of friends, should one of them set a small fire in her life, to look for patterns in the flames together and cackle.

Midway through the novel, that rhythm is disturbed: the friend asks the narrator for a life-changing favor, and the narrative shifts abruptly. The friend becomes suddenly vulnerable, and the narrator’s passivity suddenly dissipates as the magnitude of the request forces her to take action. She must decide what role she will play in the friend’s death, a decision she finds more tormenting than the death itself. This is Nunez’s primary concern in What Are You Going Through : not how a person faces her own death, but how she faces another’s. Yes, dying is a role we will all play eventually, but being near someone who’s dying, experiencing other people’s suffering, is a role we play as well.

Nunez’s title is drawn from Simone Weil: “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’” Out of context, this question seems an easy one, but Nunez’s novel imbues the query with remarkable weight and urgency. For Nunez, it’s not the question itself, or whatever answer might follow it, but rather the act of asking the question that matters. The series of sad stories, of “going-throughs” heard by the narrator, reveal the power in turning one’s attention to someone else’s sorrow, inquiring into what someone is going through, and listening to the answer. In the end, the narrator’s choice to move as close as possible to experiencing what her friend is going through, to be there for her in an inordinately intense and difficult situation, is what defines her.

During a rare public outburst, the narrator breaks down in front of a stranger who tries and fails to comfort her by expressing gratuitous pity, making her promise not to forget about “self-care.” Later, she remarks on the experience: “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.” There’s no question—the sad stories in What Are You Going Through could happen to anyone. The book poignantly reveals a sorrow that belongs to everyone, and in this, offers a lasting comfort.

Published on February 16, 2021

Like what you've read? Share it!

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH

by Sigrid Nunez ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2020

Dryly funny and deeply tender; draining and worth it.

A woman is enlisted to help a dying friend commit suicide in Nunez’s latest novel, which—true to form—is short, sharp, and quietly brutal.

Nunez returns to many of the topics she mined in The Friend , which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018: the meaning of life, the nature of death, writing, the purpose of friendship. This is hardly a criticism; in fact, what else is there? The novel, spare and elegant and immediate, often feeling closer to essay than fiction, is as much about its unnamed narrator’s thoughts as the events of her life (is there a difference?). To the extent there is a “plot”—less a “plot” than “circumstances to inspire thinking”—it is this: A writer in late middle age goes to another city to visit an old friend who is sick. Later, when it becomes clear that the friend’s condition is terminal, she enlists our narrator to assist her in ending her life. Not to help with the actual dying part—“I know what to do,” she quips. “It’s not complicated”—but rather with everything that should happen in the interim. What she wants is to rent a house for the end, nothing special, “just somewhere I can be peaceful and do the last things that need to be done.” And she would like our narrator to be there. “I can’t be completely alone,” she explains. “What if something goes wrong? What if everything goes wrong?” She will, she promises “make it as much fun as possible.” Reluctantly, the narrator agrees. Most of the novel, though, is not about this, or at least not directly. Instead, the narrator considers her past and her present. She attends the doomsday climate lecture of an ex-boyfriend. She thinks about an unpleasant neighbor. She recounts, delightfully and in great detail, the plot of a murder mystery she is reading and then circles back to the trauma of aging, for everyone, and especially for women. The novel is concerned with the biggest possible questions and confronts them so bluntly it is sometimes jarring: How should we live in the face of so much suffering?

Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-19141-5

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by Sigrid Nunez

BOOK REVIEW

by Sigrid Nunez

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2024

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

More by Sally Rooney

by Sally Rooney

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

Review: What Are You Going Through

By Sigrid Nunez ’72BC, ’75SOA (Riverhead).

“I went to hear a man give a talk,” writes Sigrid Nunez ’72BC, ’75SOA in the opening sentence of her new novel, What Are You Going Through . Like much of her prose, the line is simple and direct. But readers should not be fooled by the straightforward tone; Nunez’s seventh novel is stunningly complex, a nuanced, layered look at aging, friendship, love, and death.

Fans of Nunez will find both the themes and the voice familiar. She first earned acclaim with her 1995 debut, the autobiographical novel A Feather on the Breath of God , narrated by an unnamed mixed-race immigrant girl growing up in a Brooklyn housing project in the 1950s and ’60s. After experimenting with literary forms over the next two decades (the novel Mitz was a mock biography of Virginia Woolf’s pet marmoset; she also wrote a memoir of her 1970s friendship with Susan Sontag ’93HON), Nunez returned to the unnamed narrator in The Friend , a touching examination of grief that won the 2018 National Book Award. What Are You Going Through appears to be the next chapter in the character’s life.

The man in the novel’s first sentence is not some random stranger: he’s the narrator’s ex — though theirs is not the relationship that drives the narrative. The protagonist went to the talk while on a trip to visit a sick friend, and she uses the visit to explore the ideas of aging and love, empathy and the necessity of connecting with others. Nunez shows how easy it is to let the bonds of friendship fray.

The narrator’s tone is intimate not just as she describes encounters with her close friends but also as she reports on conversations and incidents in the lives of others. For much of the book, we are in her head, gaining insight into her character from seemingly mundane events. She recounts, for example, a conversation with a woman at her gym who strives to maintain her figure. “She knew it sounded crazy, the woman in the locker room said, but when her sister got cancer and lost thirty pounds she couldn’t help wishing it would happen to her. And was it so crazy? After all, always hating the way she looked, always fighting against her own body and always, always losing the battle meant that she was depressed all the time.” Through these encounters and reflections, Nunez gives us tender and fraught glimpses into people’s complicated lives.

It takes some time for Nunez to introduce the central plot point: the narrator’s sick friend is dying of cancer and wants her to stay by her side as she prepares to kill herself. “I will not go out in mortifying anguish,” the friend says. “I can’t be completely alone. I mean, this is a new adventure — who can say what it will really be like. What if something goes wrong? What if everything goes wrong? I need to know there’s someone in the next room.”

“Epic struggle to keep my composure, to choose my words,” Nunez’s narrator notes grimly, before asking if there is anyone else who can take on this role. But What Are You Going Through is not a sad book, despite the tears shed or fought back. When the narrator finally agrees to aid her dying friend, the friend texts back, “I promise to make it as much fun as possible.” And indeed, there is a life-affirming quality and even humor in the evolving companionship as the two women prepare for one’s death. The book may not quite have the narrative engine or emotional engagement of some of Nunez’s previous work, but the novel has much to recommend it. The writer’s willingness to examine the power of compassion for a friend and the human fear of dying alone of a terminal illness has never felt more potent or more relevant.

More From Books

8 Eye-Opening Investigative Journalism Books to Add to Your Reading List

All by Columbia alumni authors

A Cultural Guide to Satanism, Psychopaths, and the Real American Horror Story

In American Scary , scholar Jeremy Dauber explores the country’s fascination with the macabre

6 New Books to Read this Fall

All by Columbia alumni and faculty authors

Stay Connected.

Sign up for our newsletter.

General Data Protection Regulation

Columbia University Privacy Notice

Advertisement

Supported by

Books of The Times

Sigrid Nunez Follows ‘The Friend’ With a Sorrowful, Funny Novel About Death

By Dwight Garner

• Aug. 31, 2020
• Share full article

• Apple Books
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million
• Bookshop.org

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

It takes something more than intelligence to be able to write intelligently. It requires something closer to echolocation, an acute sense, in mid-flight, of where you are.

Is this sort of intelligence, Michael Kinsley asked in his book about aging, merely an extra spritz of some chemical in the brain? Whatever it is, Sigrid Nunez has it. When I open one of her novels, I almost always know immediately: This is where I want to be.

“What Are You Going Through” is Nunez’s follow-up to “The Friend,” which won a National Book Award in 2018. That novel had a big dog on the front. This one has a small cat.

Animal fanciers: Keep it together. The cat in Nunez’s novel is appealing (it wryly narrates the experience of being thrown into a dumpster) but the role it plays is sub-Guildensternish.

“What Are You Going Through” is a short novel, set roughly in the present. It’s as good as “The Friend,” if not better. The primal question it asks is this: If a terminally ill friend asked you to be with them, in another room, while they took the pills that would end their life, would you say yes or no? Either answer has its moral hazards.

The terminally ill friend in this novel resembles Susan Sontag, whom Nunez knew and wrote about in a memoir titled “Sempre Susan.” This friend is an intimidating writer; she lives in New York City; before chemotherapy, she had important hair.

This unnamed friend is, as Sontag was, a critic of illness culture. About the notion that cancer is an opportunity for spiritual growth, she asks, “Who wants to die listening to that crap.”

Some days the friend worries her death will be painful; other days she fears it will merely be a bore. The contingency of existence is an amazement to her, and difficult to metabolize. She wants to find a nice house in which to end her life. She doesn’t want it to be in a red state.

This novel has sorrow in it. It’s also quite funny. We bumble our way toward death as we bumble toward everything. Is it gauche to stay around longer than you were supposed to? One observer refers to the two friends, out in the New England Airbnb they rent, as characters in a sitcom, “Lucy and Ethel Do Euthanasia.”

The narrator, also unnamed, is a writer in late middle age who is, in the modern manner, unable to get any work done. We don’t learn a lot about her. She is, like one of Rachel Cusk’s detached narrators, attuned to the stories of others, people she meets at her gym, at her apartment building and elsewhere.

Many of the stories she hears and weighs are about aging, particularly among women. One woman, who was once considered beautiful, says: “You don’t even know how privileged you are. Then one day it all disappears. Actually, it happens gradually. You begin to notice certain things. Heads no longer turn when you pass by, people you meet don’t always later remember your face. And this becomes your new life, your strange new life: an ordinary, undesirable person with a common, forgettable face.”

She deplores the catcalls in the street, and misses them when they are gone. The past is another country; Nunez dilates on life after we’ve stopped being (if we ever were) tawny animals.

This novel also considers children. What if you have one you simply don’t like? We read about the Sontag-like character and her daughter: “Enough bones of contention between us, my friend joked, to make a whole skeleton.”

Like “The Friend,” this novel warily circles the #MeToo movement. Noting that Einstein did some racist stereotyping in his private writings, the Sontag-like character comments, “So I guess there goes the theory of relativity.”

Fox News slides into view. The narrator’s elderly neighbor says to her, “Was it really possible that Americans would elect to the highest office in the land, to the most powerful position on earth, a person so manifestly unfit, so brazenly immoral and corrupt, a person who lied with every breath and was a complete incompetent to boot?”

The person this woman has in mind is Hillary Clinton. Her son fears that Fox has planted a chip in her brain. The neighbor doesn’t take it well when the narrator remarks that Sean Hannity looks like Lou Costello.

Another character, the narrator’s ex-boyfriend, is a stern and patronizing intellectual who tours the country lecturing on humanitarian topics and on global warming, about which he says it’s too late to do anything. We’ve dithered our chances away. Is there in him a touch of Sontag’s son, the nonfiction writer and policy analyst David Rieff, whom Nunez once dated? She implies; we infer.

Being near death, in this novel, comes to seem like sitting in front of a blazing bonfire while in the Arctic: your face is aglow, thanks to your friends, but you can no longer feel your back.

“The real reason I had agreed to help my friend was that I knew that, in her place, I would have hoped to be able to do exactly what she now wanted to do,” the narrator says. She adds: “I would not be able to escape the feeling that this was all a kind of rehearsal, that my friend was showing me the way .”

Not everything clicks in “What Are You Going Through.” The novel drifts at a few moments. There are digressions into the plot of a mystery novel the narrator is reading that, like the vacuum cleaner in “Yellow Submarine,” self-suck and disappear.

But you can say about this wise novel what the narrator says about “Make Way for Tomorrow,” the Depression-era movie she watches with her dying friend: “No matter how sad, a beautifully told story lifts you up.”

Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner .

What Are You Going Through By Sigrid Nunez 210 pages. Riverhead Books. $26.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

100 Best Books of the 21st Century:  As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics  and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

Aleksei Navalny’s Prison Diaries:  In the Russian opposition leader’s posthumous memoir, compiled with help from his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny faced the fact that Vladimir Putin might succeed in silencing him .

Jeff VanderMeer’s Strangest Novel Yet:  In an interview with The Times , the author — known for his blockbuster Southern Reach series — talked about his eerie new installment, “Absolution.”

Discovering a New Bram Stoker Story:  The work by the author of “Dracula,” previously unknown to scholars, was found by a fan  who was trawling through the archives at the National Library of Ireland.

The Book Review Podcast:  Each week, top authors and critics talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

clock This article was published more than  4 years ago

Sigrid Nunez’s ‘What Are You Going Through’ is an ambitious novel about the meaning of life and death

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” That adage (variously attributed) shows up online so often it’s become almost invisible. But it’s resurrected with punch in “ What Are You Going Through .” The title of Sigrid Nunez’s disconcerting new novel comes from French philosopher Simone Weil, who believed that asking that very question, was what love of one’s neighbor truly meant.

“What Are You Going Through” initially resembles Rachel Cusk’s fiction — narrated by a fiercely intelligent teacher and writer, describing encounters with a series of individuals whose difficult stories accrue like mosaic pieces to form a painfully human tableau. Nunez’s prose, too, seems to echo Cusk’s cool, flat distance.

“I went to hear a man give a talk,” the narrator begins. “The event was held on a college campus. The man was a professor . . . a well-known author . . . I would not even have been in that town, had it not been for a coincidence.”

What the country is reading during the pandemic: Dystopias, social justice and steamy romance

Nunez — whose previous novel, “ The Friend ,” won the 2018 National Book Award — has long taught creative writing; thus, these pages dish some authoritative dirt about that world. Here’s the department head who’s invited the above speaker:

“She is a familiar type: the glam academic, the intellectual vamp. Someone at pains for it to be known that although smart and well educated, although a feminist and a woman in a position of power, the lady is no frump, no boring nerd, no sexless harridan.”

But Nunez’s project has grander designs than mere literary satire or clever portraiture (though streaks of these spice the prose). It will meditate — at length, in earnest, often graphically — upon whatever life, death and love can presently mean.

The above speaker’s message cuts to the chase: We’re doomed.

“Our world and our civilization [will] not endure,” he says, and goes on to list the many signs of that imminent apocalypse, including our failure to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction; the refugee crisis; cyberterrorism; bioterrorism and, yes, “the inevitable next great flu pandemic.”

No escape. Also, better not go on having children. What’s left?

“The only moral, meaningful course for a civilization facing its own end,” the speaker says, is “to learn how to ask forgiveness and to atone in some tiny measure for the devastating harm we had done to our human family and to our fellow creatures and to the beautiful earth. To love and forgive one another as best we could. And to learn how to say goodbye.”

More book reviews and recommendations

This overture, taken with the fact that the narrator’s about to visit an old friend succumbing to cancer, may baffle readers for its impenetrable bleakness — apt as that may be for our present straits. But because it’s Nunez, long admired for her fearless, ruminative, sharply insightful work, we push on. (The doomsday speaker later proves significant.) In the story to follow, the narrator’s mortally ill friend, anticipating the horrors of cancer treatment, confesses she means to end matters early, with pills. “Cancer can’t get me if I get me first.” She asks the narrator’s help in renting a pleasant retreat where the two can dwell together until the friend chooses to exit.

There they settle in, and talk.

Over this structure, Nunez’s narrator layers a book’s worth of memories and Reflections — told “ Decameron ”-style as stories-within-the-story: struggles with children, lovers, husbands, money, art. These accounts range with great freedom, even as dwindling time tightens the frame: cultural, sexual, and ethical ordeals; books, films, music, philosophy, gossip. The narrator despairs of keeping “a record of my friend’s last days” as a likely betrayal, not of her friend’s privacy “but of the experience itself. . . . Language would end up falsifying everything.”

Yet language is what conveys this fraught inventory. Nunez’s narrator folds incident, anecdote, history, rumor — even fairy tales — into a plaintive litany. Toward the novel’s end she describes a podcast of terminally ill people (including her friend) mulling their lives aloud, their suffering dignified by individuation. Replying to a social worker’s query, “What do you think is the meaning of your life?” the narrator’s friend snaps: “That it stops.”

One’s moved by the scope and pith of this novel’s ambition, as it addresses our biggest questions by naming the particular — the way the dying recited what mattered to them in Wim Wenders’s iconic film “Wings of Desire.” But most striking may be how Nunez’s narrator transfigures, through deepening compassion, from a wry, circumspect observer into someone raked raw with hapless love for her vanishing friend: “Every now and then she would squeeze my hand . . . as if she had squeezed my heart.” What’s more, the narrator already foresees memory’s distancing of this extraordinary interval, lending it “that taint of the surreal.” This infuriates her. “Life is but a dream. . . . Could there be a crueler notion?”

Still, it’s the here-and-now of “What Are You Going Through” that spears us, its chorale-like testimonies, their preemptive requiem. There are those, muses the narrator, “who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind . . . help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.”

Joan Frank’s  recent books are “Where You’re All Going: Four Novellas” and “Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place.” Her new novel, “The Outlook for Earthlings,” will be published Oct. 2 by Regal House Publishing.

What Are You Going Through

By Sigrid Nunez

Riverhead. 224 pp. $26

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

• Mystery / Thrillers
• Action & Adventure
• Sci-Fi / Fantasy
• Biographies
• Young Adult
• Children’s Books
• Book News & Events
• The Exclamation Point!
• Best Sellers & Trending
• In the News
• Press Releases
• Science Fiction
• Fantasy Authors
• Business Authors
• Author Interviews
• Video Interviews
• Essays & Articles

Discover Books

• Book Excerpts
• Books to Screen
• Book Club Picks
• BookTrib Lit Picks Sign up for your FREE eBook.
• Our Mission
• Contributors
• Write For Us
• Book Giveaways

New Novel From National Book Award Winner Sigrid Nunez

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez

What Are You Going Through ( Riverhead Books ) by National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez is a perfect follow-up to her previous novel, The Friend , where a woman’s friend passes away and she takes on the responsibility of her dog.

In Nunez’s latest novel, empathy is the focus when this narrator’s friend, who has cancer, asks if they could go away on vacation together. Her plan is to not be alone during the trip when she decides to end her own life with pills. Companionship and friendship have risks and the narrator agrees to the vacation, taking it all on to accompany her friend on this emotional journey.

“I don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, that could happen to me, and those who think, that will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.”

The characters’ exploration of the will to survive, the zest for life and the finality of death give the reader a lot to think about. The unnamed narrator describes several encounters with random people she crosses paths with in her life and these stories help to answer questions about humanity and the title question: what are you going through?

Although the premise of What Are You Going Through sounds depressing, the story is not. Nunez is introspective and thoughtful, clever and humorous. Her characters are humane and compassionate. 

Through her storytelling, Nunez addresses illness, forgiveness and communication, along with the challenges of being a writer. She also demonstrates how people have a need to tell their stories, and the stories are interesting if you bother to stop and listen. 

What Are You Going Through is available for purchase.

RELATED POSTS

Check out the BookNationByJen review of The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, a wonderful story about a woman and her dog.

Buy this Book!

Jennifer Blankfein

Jennifer Gans Blankfein is a freelance marketing consultant and book reviewer. She graduated from Lehigh University with a Psychology degree and has a background in advertising. Her experience includes event coordination and fundraising along with editing a weekly, local, small business newsletter. Jennifer loves to talk about books, is an avid reader, and currently writes a book blog, Book Nation by Jen . She lives in Connecticut with her husband, two sons and black lab.

Previous Post Little Anton by John W. Warner IV

Next post pharaohs, gods and kingdoms: 9 tales from ancient egypt, you may also like, amid chaos lies beauty, growth, and the promise of unexpected bonds.

7 of This Year’s Most Spellbinding Releases

20 Stories Examining the Complexities of Mother-Daughter Relationships

Leave a Reply Cancel Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Book Promotion

© 2024 BookTrib.. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms Of Use | Accessibility Statement This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Enter your information to download the chapter now.

Fill Out The Form and Receive A Free Book Marketing Consultation

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice One of People Magazine ‘s 10 Best Books of Fall

Editors’ choice: 9 recommended books of the week ( new york times ), best september books ( entertainment weekly ), 16 best books of september ( kirkus ), best books of fall ( observer ), 6 best books of september ( shondaland ), 10 most anticipated releases of september ( huffpost ), best books of fall ( time ), 21 best books of fall ( buzzfeed ), 5 books not to miss ( usa today ), best books of september ( cnn ), best books of 2020 ( harper’s bazaar ), what are you going through.

Riverhead Books, Hardcover, September 8, 2020 / Paperback, September 7, 2021

NOW A FILM,  THE ROOM NEXT DOOR , BY PEDRO ALMODÓVAR, WITH JULIANNE MOORE AND TILDA SWINTON

National bestseller, a new york times critics’ top book of 2020, one of people magazine’s top 10 books of 2020, a best book of 2020: o,the oprah magazine, kirkus reviews, times literary supplement, the guardian , and npr, a pick of the year’s best paperbacks, 2021, by the sunday times (uk) .

A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life. Some, like the old friend she goes to visit at a cancer clinic, are people she knows well; others are total strangers. All share a need to talk about themselves. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices, sometimes paraphrasing others’ stories, other times allowing them to speak, in extended monologues, for themselves. What emerges is a portrait of the way we live now, in a world endlessly troubled by crises, and the dramatically changing nature of human relationships in our time. For the most part, the narrator assumes the role of a passive listener to her collective storytellers. Then one of them surprises her with an extraordinary request, and she is drawn into what will become an intense and transformative experience of her own.

Praise for What Are You Going Through

“Love, death, friendship, compassion and so much wisdom. I just adore Sigrid Nunez.” Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train and Into the Water.

“It takes something more than intelligence to be able to write intelligently. It requires something closer to echolocation, an acute sense, in mid-flight, of where you are . . . . Whatever it is, Sigrid Nunez has it. When I open one of her novels, I almost always know immediately: This is where I want to be. . . . “What Are You Going Through” . . . [is] as good as “The Friend,” if not better.” The New York Times

“Rereading ‘What Are You Going Through,’ I was dazed by the novel’s grace: its creation of a narrative consciousness that, by emptying and extending itself to others, insured that its vitality would never dwindle, never dim. Nunez had captured what Woolf, in her exquisite story on aging, “The Lady in the Looking Glass,” describes as life’s ‘profounder state of being,’ ‘the state that is to the mind what breathing is to the body.’”  The New Yorker

“Nunez tells the simplest of stories . . . and expands it into an exploration of the largest of themes: nothing less than the realities of living and dying in this world and how we feel about both. Beauty, friendship, nature, art: These are the salves to loneliness and despair, and Nunez offers them all in this searching look into life and death.” The New York Times Book Review

“A book as luminous as it is deep and as slippery as it is firmly grounded. As its narrator observes, ‘[N]o matter how sad, a beautifully told story lifts you up.’ ‘What Are You Going Through’ is as beautifully told as they come.”  Seattle Times

“Emotionally intense and impossible to put down . . . leavened with wit and tenderness.”  People Magazine

“Nunez’s prose is conspiratorial and elegant, whimsical and wise. Alongside a contemplation of mortality are winks: For all its pain and seriousness, life is absurd, comical; we humans are impossible to figure out—and yet so tender.” O, The Oprah Magazine

“It’s Nunez, long admired for her fearless, ruminative, sharply insightful work. . . . One’s moved by the scope and pith of this novel’s ambition, as it addresses our biggest questions by naming the particular. . . . But most striking may be how Nunez’s narrator transfigures, through deepening compassion, from a wry, circumspect observer into someone raked raw with hapless love for her vanishing friend. . . . It’s the here-and-now of ‘What Are You Going Through’ that spears us, its chorale-like testimonies, their preemptive requiem.”  Washington Post

“[A] beautiful portrait of pain and loss.”  TIME Magazine

“ What Are You Going Through is unflinching on the theme of mortality and thus presents an openhearted honesty so rare it feels thirst-quenching.” — The Paris Review “ What Are You Going Through  explicitly aims for and pretty much manages to hit all of William Faulkner’s prescribed goalposts for writers: ‘love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.’ Nunez has written another deeply humane reminder of the great solace of both companionship and literature.” NPR  

“There was a profound textual pleasure in  The Friend  and there is in  What Are You Going Through , too. It’s not just that these books feel ‘real’ in that the things that happen in them could happen in life; the narrators’ struggle to think and write and make sense of these experiences feels real.”  Bookforum  

“[A] touching, poignant illustration of what it means to have empathy for the lives around you. It is especially apt, given how the book is published during a time of collective mourning.” USA Today

“Nunez’s accounts are as sensitive as a polygraph’s needle, the precision of her observations turning banality itself into a source of pathos . . . . Among the keenest observers of the messiness of pity, compassion, and love, her writing takes ideas about how we should treat other beings seriously while never losing sight of the social conditions that make such work so complicated and hard.” Los Angeles Review of Books

“Nunez is both direct and yet incredibly subtle as she traces choices we make when faced with questions of sustainability and end of life care in this powerful novel.”  Observer

“[A] digressive and surprisingly cheerful and funny tale . . . . crafted with consummate care . . . . with meditations on writing, the life of the mind, how we age, feminism, Me Too and our obligation to others.” The Sunday Times (UK)  

“A remarkable exploration of life and death, Sigrid Nunez’s novel is a quiet, almost meditative experience—and all the more powerful for it . . . . [Its] melancholy is tempered with humour and a revelatory appreciation of small moments of pleasure and friendship, perhaps the best way to be right now.” The Observer (UK)

“No moment is not fertile; nothing is insignificant as Nunez threads her connective material to give a riveting picture of friendship intensifying as it draws to a close. . . . All stories are love stories, she tells us. And few take us in so beautifully capacious a way to the place where this one ends.” Times Literary Supplement

“[A] gloriously meditative novel about friendship, death, and the bleak state of the world . . . . [A]lthough it encompasses so much sorrow, it is also a true pleasure to read, a novel bursting with wit, warmth, and human empathy.” The Independent

“[B]rilliant . . . . The narrative control of this novel simply dazzles. Nunez moves into and out of first and third person, past and present tense and direct and indirect speech as though she were shifting the gears of a Ferrari at full speed on a race track.”  The Spectator

“ What Are You Going Through considers what it means to die well . . . . But as with The Friend , the book’s appeal lies less in the plot, such as it is, than in the wandering thoughts and insightful observations that it sets off.” The Economist

“This is not a book about empathy so much as respect for the unknowable . . . . It’s a mark of Nunez’s wisdom that she has created something witty and hopeful from characters who are surveying the closing stages of life.” Financial Times

“Nunez widens and narrows the focus of her lens, from the death of the world, to the death of a close friend and back again, with superb control. Her writing is taut, clear and insightful. Evening Standard

“Big questions about mortality and responsibility rebound through this philosophical novel . . . . [T]he result is . . . personable and invigorating, and delivered in intoxicatingly readable, washed-clean prose reminiscent of Rachel Cusk.”  Daily Mail

“Profound, moving and brilliant.” Mail on Sunday

“At a time when the pandemic has made everyone feel unmoored, this book serves as a respite from modern anxieties. Spare in its emotional coherence, Nunez renders a graceful portrait of empathy amid chaos. This is a heartbreaking yet life-affirming book about the stress and solitude of being alive – a compassionate portrayal of life as we know it.” The Skinny

“Like its National Book Award-winning predecessor, The Friend , this exquisite portrait of female friendship, aging and loss packs more insight into its barely 200 pages than many serious novels twice that length.” BookPage

“Told with her singular sensitivity and wit,  What Are You Going Through  is a quietly powerful testament to Sigrid Nunez’s ability to render even the most emotionally ruinous events with intimacy and grace — there is no better chronicler of empathy . . . This book is profound, devastating and uplifting all at once.” Refinery29

“[A] richly interiorized novel. . . . With both compassion and joy, Nunez contemplates how we survive life’s certain suffering, and don’t, with words and one another.” Booklist , starred review

“ A deeply compassionate book about death, modern life, and human connection.” Harper’s Bazaar

“Sigrid Nunez orchestrates a beautiful chorus of humanness here, and the novel asks a question we might all be thinking in these distanced times: What does it mean to really be there for someone in times of hardship?” Literary Hub

“Deeply empathetic without being sentimental, this novel explores women’s lives, their choices, and how they support one another. . . . Highly recommended for readers who favor emotional resonance over escapism during difficult times.” Library Journal ,  starred review

“Nunez returns to many of the topics she mined in The Friend, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018: the meaning of life, the nature of death, writing, the purpose of friendship. [S]pare and elegant and immediate … the novel is concerned with the biggest possible questions and confronts them so bluntly it is sometimes jarring: How should we live in the face of so much suffering? Dryly funny and deeply tender; draining and worth it.” Kirkus , starred review

“Deceptively casual and ultimately fierce. . . .  Much of the novel’s action is internal, as the attention of its . . . narrator flicks from books to movies to sharp-edged thoughts about the people she encounters, offering plenty of surprises. Those willing to jump along with her should be tantalized by the provocative questions she raises.” Publishers Weekly

• Member Login
• Library Patron Login
• Get a Free Issue of our Ezine! Claim

BookBrowse Reviews What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reading Guide  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

What Are You Going Through

• BookBrowse Review:
• Critics' Consensus:
• Readers' Rating:
• Be the First to Review
• First Published:
• Sep 8, 2020, 224 pages
• Sep 2021, 224 pages

• Literary Fiction
• Contemporary
• Dealing with Loss
• Asian Authors
• Female Friendships
• Philosophical
• Publication Information
• Write a Review
• Buy This Book

About This Book

• Reading Guide
• Media Reviews
• Reader Reviews

An intense intellectual wander through matters of life and death.

Shortly into What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, it becomes clear that the narrator is unreliable or, at the very least, absentminded; she has misled the reader by failing to mention a significant connection she has to another character. What additional details might she be withholding? This question becomes less consequential as the book winds on. The unnamed main character may conceal facts and approach the stories of others with marked bias, but what she shares soon begins to feel more important than what she doesn't, and the limits of her subjectivity begin to seem like the point. If the novel is about any one thing, it is the narrator's experience of becoming involved in the end-of-life plans of a friend who has terminal cancer, but there are many detours along this main path. Like Nunez's National Book Award-winning novel The Friend , What Are You Going Through opts out of linear storytelling and follows the whims and quirks of its primary character's mind, sometimes striking out on tangents within tangents in a style that bears similarities to that of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy. The narrator seriously ponders her friend's condition, but she also takes the time to listen to a story told by a cat, describe the plot of a crime novel she finds in an Airbnb lodging and attend a dismal lecture about the state of the world. Events and reflections like these come together to reveal the character indirectly through her perceptions and interactions, transcending the borders of her perspective to give the reader a more complete picture of her. The book's tendency to go down rabbit holes may be initially disconcerting for some, but its digressions are by turns conversational, humorous and philosophically engrossing. Just as secondary characters work to reveal the primary one, tangential preoccupations ranging from gender politics to aging and beauty to climate change eventually form the shape of what remains to be addressed: the probing question of how to exist in the midst of death — how to witness the death of a friend, the death of the planet — while still living life with any sense of purpose. Through this question and the narrator's clearly limited point of view, Nunez's novel also focuses on communication and the realities people represent for one another. The title of the book is taken from the work of French philosopher Simone Weil (see Beyond the Book ) — according to Weil, loving one's neighbor hinges on the ability to ask, "Quel est ton tourment?" or "What are you going through?" This question stands more or less as the antithesis of the obligatory American "How are you?" to which the expected response is a rote "Fine, how are you?" In keeping with Weil's encouragement towards meaningful connection, the unexpected bond the narrator forms with her friend during her illness bypasses customary social evasions and opens the way to a deeper examination of human relationships. The book's most touching and striking element is its depiction of the intensity produced in situations where time is precious. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator mentions a book she is reading that compares watching someone die to falling in love. The two events seem to mesh in her mind as she considers her feelings about observing her friend's final days:

Jesus, you know, it wasn't supposed to happen like this. Even if it strikes me now as having been inevitable. But doesn't love always feel just so: destined, no matter how unexpected, no matter how improbable.

While there is nothing new in connecting love with death, Nunez's writing succeeds in capturing the strange, startling illumination both can bring. It also draws attention to how people sometimes diminish profound life experiences by corralling them into narrow ideas of beauty and romance. What Are You Going Through suggests that this diminishment may be overcome by a genuine curiosity about and interest in other human beings. As the narrator points out at one stage, Weil's question "What are you going through?" reads differently in the original French. She doesn't elaborate, but a literal translation of "Quel est ton tourment?" produces a question arguably even more generous and intimate, matching the generous and intimate tone of Nunez's novel: "What is your torment?"

• "Beyond the Book" articles
• Free books to read and review (US only)
• Find books by time period, setting & theme
• Read-alike suggestions by book and author
• Book club discussions
• and much more!
• Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
• More about membership!

Beyond the Book:    Simone Weil (1909-1943)

Read-alikes.

• Genres & Themes

If you liked What Are You Going Through, try these:

The Anthropologists

by Aysegül Savas

Published 2024

About This book

Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family?

Someday, Maybe

by Onyi Nwabineli

More by this author

Someday, Maybe is a stunning, witty debut novel about a young woman's emotional journey through unimaginable loss, pulled along by her tight-knit Nigerian family, a posse of friends, and the love and laughter she shared with her husband.

Members Recommend

Libby Lost and Found by Stephanie Booth

Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.

Who Said...

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Solve this clue:

H I O the G

and be entered to win..

Your guide to exceptional           books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.

Book Nation by Jen

Best book blog for reviews, recommendations and author interviews, through thoughtful storytelling, sigrid nunez asks the question…what are you going through.

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez is a perfect follow up to her previous book, The Friend , where a woman’s friend passes away and she takes on the responsibility of her dog.

In Nunez’s latest novel, empathy is the focus when this narrator’s friend, who has cancer, asks if they could go away on vacation together. Her plan is to not be alone during the trip when she decides to end her own life with pills. Companionship and friendship have risks and the narrator agrees to the vacation, taking it all on to accompany her friend on this emotional journey.

“I don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, that could happen to me, and those who think, that will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.”

The characters’ exploration of the will to survive, the zest for life and the finality of death give the reader a lot to think about. The unnamed narrator describes several encounters with random people she crossed paths with in her life and these stories help to answer questions about humanity and the title question, What Are You Going Through.

Through her storytelling, author Sigrid Nunez addresses illness, forgiveness and communication, along with the challenges of being a writer. She also indicates how people have a need to tell their story, and the stories are interesting if you bother to stop and listen. Although the premise of What Are You Going Through sounds depressing, the story is not. I happen to really enjoy the author’s writing and find her to be introspective and thoughtful in her novels. Nunez is clever and humorous, and her characters are humane and compassionate. I highly recommend this book.

More from Sigrid Nunez

If you want to read more from this National Book Award-Winning Author, check out The Friend , a wonderful story about a woman and her dog.

Goodreads Summary

About the Author

Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including  A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City , and, most recently,  The Friend . She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag .  The Friend,  a  New York Times  bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In France, it was longlisted for the 2019 Prix Femina and named a finalist for the 2019 Prix du Meilleure Livre. It has also been shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Nunez’s other honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Among the journals to which she has contributed are  The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, 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. One of her short stories was selected for  The Best American Short Stories 2019.  Her work has either been or is being translated into twenty-five languages.

Nunez has taught at Columbia, Princeton, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. Currently teaching at Boston University, she 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.

Share this:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Discover more from Book Nation by Jen

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

Review: 'What Are You Going Through,' by Sigrid Nunez

FICTION: Melancholy vigil is lightened by witty rapport between friends.

By Jackie Thomas-Kennedy

In her latest novel, Sigrid Nunez's narrator, an unnamed writer, joins an unnamed friend on a grim and sorrowful errand: The friend, a journalist with terminal cancer, wants to end her own life in a quaint rental house, and she wants someone else nearby.

"What Are You Going Through," is broken into three periods — the time preceding this request, followed by the days of its attempted fulfillment, followed by the aftermath. All of the sections are concerned not only with the friend's intentions, but also with a host of intellectual matters that dovetail with the plight of incurable illness.

The novel devotes a considerable amount of space to highlights from a presentation made by the narrator's ex, in which he expounds on climate change. "It was useless, the man said, to deny that suffering … lay ahead, or that there'd be any escaping it."

This sets up a naturally melancholic atmosphere, though the mood is often lightened by the narrator's curiosity and compassion, and the witty rapport she shares with her dying friend.

Both women are furiously engaged with language; the friend remarks that she would like the term "fatal" to replace "terminal," because "Terminal makes me think of bus stations."

Nunez repeatedly describes the act of reading, dwelling on it, giving it sanctity and heft; the narrator makes brief nods to her past relationships but delivers long-winded summaries and reviews of books she has read, or started to read. "If you put a group of women in a book, you have 'women's fiction,' " she notes. "To be shunned by almost all male readers and no few female ones as well." This novel is an unsubtle retort to such a shunning.

Before she retreats to the rental house with her ill friend, the narrator, quoting "a famous playwright," remarks that there are "no uninteresting human lives, and that you'd discover this if you were willing to sit and listen to people." She offers this service to her friend — the friend talks for hours; the narrator listens, encouraging — but the narrator offers only minimal glimpses of her own life. At one point, she gives a richer recounting of a cat's history than her own. Her ode to the importance of story, while declining to tell her own, can be taxing for the reader, true as it may be to her character.

Among the various discussions the narrator enjoys with her friend are questions of genre — how does a mystery novel work? What about romance and fairy tales? What are the limits of language, powerful as it is? "We talk glibly about finding the right words, but about the most important things, those words we never find," the narrator says. Nunez, bold and undaunted, approaches those stories anyway.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in Electric Literature, LennyLetter, Narrative, the Millions, Harvard Review and elsewhere. She held a 2014-16 Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

What Are You Going Through By: Sigrid Nunez. Publisher: Riverhead, 210 pages, $26.

about the writer

Jackie thomas-kennedy, more from books, the pandemic made writer kate dicamillo realize, 'i'm not going to get through this unless i have a fairy tale to write'.

LOCAL FICTION: Featuring stories within stories, she’ll discuss the book at Talking Volumes on Tuesday.

One of the world's first serial killers struck Minneapolis more than a century ago

"The Mesmerist" is a new novel about the killer who stalked Hennepin Avenue in the 1880s.

Selling your house? Just hope the would-be buyer in ‘The House Hunt’ doesn’t show up

FICTION: C.M. Ewan’s novel capitalizes on the paranoia of having to open our homes to strangers.

• Literature & Fiction
• Genre Fiction

Buy new: .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } -47% $13.89 $ 13 . 89 FREE delivery October 30 - November 1 Ships from: kozybooks85 Sold by: kozybooks85

Save with used - good .savingpriceoverride { color:#cc0c39important; font-weight: 300important; } .reinventmobileheaderprice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerdisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventpricesavingspercentagemargin, #apex_offerdisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventpricepricetopaymargin { margin-right: 4px; } $9.97 $ 9 . 97 free delivery november 9 - 14 on orders shipped by amazon over $35 ships from: amazon sold by: greatbookdealz, return this item for free.

We offer easy, convenient returns with at least one free return option: no shipping charges. All returns must comply with our returns policy.

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select your preferred free shipping option
• Drop off and leave!

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

What Are You Going Through: A Novel Hardcover – September 8, 2020

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 224 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Riverhead Books
• Publication date September 8, 2020
• Dimensions 5.3 x 0.83 x 8.3 inches
• ISBN-10 0593191412
• ISBN-13 978-0593191415
• See all details

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

I went to hear a man give a talk. The event was held on a college campus. The man was a professor, but he taught at a different school, in another part of the country. He was a well-known author, who, earlier that year, had won an international prize. But although the event was free and open to the public, the auditorium was only half full. I myself would not have been in the audience, I would not even have been in that town, had it not been for a coincidence. A friend of mine was being treated in a local hospital that specializes in treating her particular type of cancer. I had come to visit this friend, this very dear old friend whom I had not seen in several years, and whom, given the gravity of her illness, I might not see again.

It was the third week of September, 2017. I had booked a room through Airbnb. The host was a retired librarian, a widow. From her profile I knew that she was also the mother of four, the grandmother of six, and that her hobbies included cooking and going to the theater. She lived on the top floor of a small condo about two miles from the hospital. The apartment was clean and tidy and smelled faintly of cumin. The guest room was decorated in the way that most people appear to have agreed will make a person feel at home: plush area rugs, a bed with a hedge of pillows and a plump down duvet, a small table holding a ceramic pitcher of dried flowers, and, on the nightstand, a stack of paperback mysteries. The kind of place where I never do feel at home. What most people call cozy-gemŸtlich, hygge-others find stifling.

A cat had been promised, but I saw no sign of one. Only later, when it was time for me to leave, would I learn that, between my booking and my stay, the host's cat had died. She delivered this news brusquely, immediately changing the subject so that I couldn't ask her about it-which I was in fact going to do only because something in her manner made me think that she wanted to be asked about it. And it occurred to me that maybe it wasn't emotion that had made her change the subject like that but rather worry that I might later complain. Depressing host talked too much about dead cat. The sort of comment you saw on the site all the time.

In the kitchen, as I drank the coffee and ate from the tray of snacks the host had prepared for me (while she, in the way recommended for Airbnb hosts, made herself scarce), I studied the corkboard where she posted publicity for guests about goings-on in town. An exhibition of Japanese prints, an arts-and-crafts fair, a visiting Canadian dance company, a jazz festival, a Caribbean culture festival, a schedule for the local sports arena, a spoken-word reading. And, that night, at seven thirty, the author's talk.

In the photograph, he looks harsh-no, "harsh" is too harsh. Call it stern. That look that comes to many older white men at a certain age: stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing gaze. Like raptors. Hardly inviting. Hardly an image to say, Please, do come hear me speak. Would love to see you there! More like, Make no mistake, I know a lot more than you do. You should listen to me. Maybe then you'll know what's what.

A woman introduces him. The head of the department that has invited him to speak. She is a familiar type: the glam academic, the intellectual vamp. Someone at pains for it to be known that, although smart and well educated, although a feminist and a woman in a position of power, the lady is no frump, no boring nerd, no sexless harridan. And so what if she's past a certain age. The cling of the skirt, the height of the heels, the scarlet mouth and tinted hair (I once heard a salon colorist say, I believe it's got to hurt a woman's ability to think if she has gray hair), everything says: I'm still fuckable. A slimness that almost certainly means going much of each day feeling hungry. It crosses such women's minds with some sad regularity that in France intellectuals can be sex symbols. Even if the symbol can sometimes be embarrassing (Bernard-Henri LŽvy and his unbuttoned shirts). These women have memories of being tormented in girlhood, not for their looks but for their brains. "Men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses" really meant smart girls, bookish girls, mathletes, and science geeks. Times change. Now who doesn't love eyewear. Now how common is it to hear a man boast about his attraction to smart women. Or, as one young actor recently shared: I've always felt that the sexiest women are the ones with the biggest brains. At which I confess I rolled my eyes so hard that I had to toss my head to get them to come down again.

It cannot possibly be true, can it, the story about Toscanini losing patience during a rehearsal with a soprano, grabbing her large breasts and crying, If only these were brains!

Later came "Men don't make passes at girls with fat asses."

I can see them, this man and this woman, at the department dinner that will surely follow the event, and which, because of who he is, will be a fine one, at one of the area's most expensive restaurants, and where it's likely they'll be seated next to each other. And of course the woman will be hoping for some intense conversation-no small talk-maybe even a bit of flirtation, but this will turn out to be not so easy given how his attention keeps straying to the far end of the table, to the grad student who's been assigned as his escort, responsible for shuttling him from place to place, including after tonight's dinner back to his hotel, and who, after just one glass of wine, is responding to his frequent glances with increasingly bold ones of her own.

It looks like it might be true. I googled it. According to some reports, though, he didn't actually grab the soprano's breasts but only pointed at them.

During the obligatory recitation of the speaker's accomplishments, the man lowers his gaze and assumes a grimace of discomfort in an affectation of modesty that I doubt fools anyone.

If grades had depended more on how much I absorbed from lectures than from studying texts I'd have failed out of school. I don't often lose concentration when I'm reading something or listening to a person converse, but talks of any kind have always given me trouble (the worst being authors reading from their own work). My mind starts wandering almost as soon as the speaker gets started. Also, this particular evening I was unusually distracted. I had spent all afternoon in the hospital with my friend. I was wrung out from watching her suffer, and from trying not to let my dismay at her condition get the better of me and become obvious to her. Dealing with illness: I've never been good at that, either.

So my mind wandered. It wandered right from the start. I lost the thread of the talk several times. But it hardly mattered, because the man's talk was based on a long article he had written for a magazine, and I had read the article when it came out. I had read it, and everyone I knew had read it. My friend in the hospital had read it. My guess was, most people in the audience had too. It occurred to me that at least some of them had come because they wanted to ask questions, to hear a discussion of what the man had to say, the substance of which they were already familiar with from the article. But the man had made the unusual decision not to take any questions. There was to be no discussion tonight. This, however, we wouldn't know until after he'd finished speaking.

It was all over, he said. He quoted another writer, translating from the French: Before man, the forest; after him, the desert. Whatever must be done to forestall catastrophe, whatever actions or sacrifices, it was now clear that humankind lacked the will, the collective will, to undertake them. To any intelligent alien, he said, we would appear to be in the grip of a death wish.

It was over, he said again. No more the faith and consolation that had sustained generations and generations, the knowledge that, though our own individual time on earth must end, what we loved and what had meaning for us would go on, the world of which we had been a part would endure-that time had ended, he said. Our world and our civilization would not endure, he said. We must live and die in this new knowledge.

Our world and our civilization would not endure, the man said, because they could not survive the many forces we ourselves had set against it. We, our own worst enemy, had set ourselves up like sitting ducks, not only allowing weapons capable of killing us all many times over to be created but also for them to land in the hands of egomaniacs, nihilists, men without empathy, without conscience. Between our failure to control the spread of WMDs and our failure to keep from power those for whom their use was not only thinkable but perhaps even an irresistible temptation, apocalyptic war was becoming increasingly likely. . . .

When we go, the man said, pretty as it might be to think so, we will not be replaced by a race of noble and intelligent apes. Comforting, perhaps, to imagine that, with humans extinct, the planet might have a chance. Alas, the animal kingdom was doomed, he said. Though none of the evil would be of their making, the apes and all the other creatures were doomed along with us-those that human activity would not have annihilated already, that is.

But say there was no nuclear threat, the man said. Say, by some miracle, the world's entire nuclear arsenal had been pulverized overnight. Would we not still be faced with the perils that generations of human stupidity, shortsightedness, and capacity for self-delusion had produced . . .

The fossil fuel industrialists, the man said. How many were they, how many were we? It beggared belief that we, a free people, citizens of a democracy, had failed to stop them, had failed to stand up to these men and their political enablers working so assiduously at climate change denial. And to think that these same people had already reaped profits of billions, making them some of the richest people ever to have lived. But when the most powerful nation in the world took their side, swaggered to the very forefront of denial, what hope did Planet Earth have. That the masses of refugees fleeing shortages of food and clean water caused by global ecological disaster would find compassion anywhere their desperation drove them was absurd, the man said. On the contrary, we would soon see man's inhumanity to man on a scale like nothing that had ever been seen before.

The man was a good speaker. He had an iPad on the lectern in front of him, to which his gaze fell from time to time, but instead of reading straight from the text he spoke as though he'd memorized every line. In that way he was like an actor. A good actor. He was very good. Not once did he hesitate or stumble over a word, but nor did the talk come off as rehearsed. A gift. He spoke with authority and was nothing if not convincing, clearly sure of everything he said. As in the article I'd read and on which the talk was based, he supported his statements with numerous references. But there was also something about him that said that he didn't really care about being convincing. It was not a matter of opinion, what he said, it was irrefutable fact. It made no difference whether you believed him or not. This being the case, it struck me as odd, it struck me as really truly odd, his giving that talk. I had thought, because he was addressing people in the flesh, people who'd come out to hear him, that he would take a different tone from the one I remembered from the magazine article. I had thought that this time there'd be some, if not sanguine, at least not utterly doomster takeaway; a gesture, at least, to some possible way forward; a crumb, if only a crumb it be, of hope. As in, Now that I've got your attention, now that I've scared the bejesus out of you, let's talk about what might be done. Otherwise, why talk to us at all, sir? This, I was sure, was what other people in the audience must also have been feeling.

Cyberterrorism. Bioterrorism. The inevitable next great flu pandemic, for which we were, just as inevitably, unprepared. Incurable killer infections borne of our indiscriminate use of antibiotics. The rise of far-right regimes around the world. The normalization of propaganda and deceit as political strategy and basis for government policy. The inability to defeat global jihadism. Threats to life and liberty-to anything worthy of the name civilization-were flourishing, the man said. In short supply, on the other hand, were the means to combat them. . . .

And who could believe that the concentration of such vast power in the hands of a few tech corporations-not to mention the system for mass surveillance on which their dominance and profits depended-could be in humanity's future best interests. Who could seriously doubt that these companies' tools might one day become the most amazingly effective means to the most ruthless imaginable ends. Yet how helpless we were before our tech gods and masters, the man said. It was a good question, he said: Just how many more opioids could Silicon Valley come up with before it was all over. What would life be like when the system ensured that the individual no longer even had the option to say no to being followed everywhere and constantly shouted at and poked like an animal in a cage. Again, how had a supposedly freedom-loving people allowed this to happen? Why were people not outraged by the very idea of surveillance capitalism? Scared right out of their wits by Big Tech? An alien one day studying our collapse might well conclude: Freedom was too much for them. They would rather be slaves.

A person who only read the man's words, rather than hearing and watching him speak, would probably have imagined him quite different from the way he actually was that night. Given the words, the meaning, the horrific facts, a person would probably imagine some show of emotion. Not these calm, cadenced sentences. Not this dispassionate mask. Only once did I catch a flicker of feeling: when he was talking about the animals, a slight catch in his throat. For humans, there seemed to be no pity in him. From time to time as he spoke, he looked out over the lectern and raked the audience with his raptor's gaze. Later, I thought I understood why he hadn't wanted to take questions. Have you ever been at a Q&A where at least one person did not make some thoughtless remark or ask the kind of irrelevant question that suggested that they hadn't been listening to a thing the speaker just said? I could see how, for this speaker, after this talk, something like that would have been unendurable. Maybe he was afraid he'd lose his temper. Because of course it was there: Beneath the cool, the control, you could sense it. Deep and volcanic emotion. Which, were he to allow himself to express it, would spew out of the top of his head and burn us all to ash.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books; First Edition (September 8, 2020)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593191412
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593191415
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 0.83 x 8.3 inches
• #663 in Friendship Fiction (Books)
• #1,994 in Women's Friendship Fiction
• #8,091 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Sigrid nunez.

Sigrid Nunez was born in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father, whose lives she drew on for part of her first novel, A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD (1995). She went on to write six more novels, including THE LAST OF HER KIND (2006), SALVATION CITY (2010), THE FRIEND (2018), and WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH (September, 2020). She is also the author of SEMPRE SUSAN: A MEMOIR OF SUSAN SONTAG (2011). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize, a Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Learn more at www.sigridnunez.com.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 47% 30% 15% 5% 3% 47%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 47% 30% 15% 5% 3% 30%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 47% 30% 15% 5% 3% 15%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 47% 30% 15% 5% 3% 5%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 47% 30% 15% 5% 3% 3%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the book compelling, interesting, and wonderful. They also appreciate the thought-provoking ideas and powerful observations. Readers describe the writing quality as witty, amusing, and wonderful. Opinions are mixed on the writing style, with some finding it beautiful and clear, while others say the language is dull and mistakes are throughout. Readers also have mixed opinions on the story quality, with some finding it compelling and authentic, while others say it stops short and lacks an ending.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book compelling, intelligent, and companionable. They also describe it as a beautiful stream-of-consciousness novel with references to 1930's movies. Readers mention the narrative flows like a river.

"It's an absolutely beautiful and strong narrative , that flows like a river, soothes you, and then it hits you when you least expect it...." Read more

"A pretty good read with some great insights , but mostly....meh." Read more

"...This is a novel worth reading ." Read more

"Quite simply an amazing book . In this slim volume Nunez gives the reader more to think about than most nooks of twice the length." Read more

Customers find the book thought-provoking, interesting, and powerful. They describe the author as intelligent, moving, and companionable.

"...In some cases, just a collection of powerful observations , which work together to prove the point of view...." Read more

"...I found kernels of wisdom and thought provoking ideas on nearly every page. My only disappointment was that there isn't much of an ending...." Read more

"This meditation on life, death, live, and friendship is witty and intelligent as well as touching...." Read more

"...Exploring life through authentic story telling with moments of thought-provoking ideas and confessions about the human experience." Read more

Customers find the writing quality wonderful and witty. They appreciate the literary references and quotations.

"The writing is great , characters are wonderfully drawn and the story is moving while devoid of any sentimentality...." Read more

"...I valued the literary references and quotations , as well as the humor and humanity found in this piece." Read more

"Tender. Provocative. Amusing . Honest...." Read more

"...An introspective to “tell it like it is.” The writing was wonderful , but with very few glimmers of hope. Just not my kind of book." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing style of the book. Some mention it's beautiful, clear, and movingly. Others say the language is dull, there are mistakes throughout, and the author is not an accomplished writer.

"It's an absolutely beautiful and strong narrative, that flows like a river, soothes you, and then it hits you when you least expect it...." Read more

"...The author is not an accomplished writer in my opinion. The language is dull , and there are mistakes throughout...." Read more

"This book was so well written ,! although it's about a big issue (cancer) the writer keeps a low profile , not sinister..." Read more

"...Just couldn't feel it. The writing is fine , though not wonderful...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the story quality. Some mention it's compelling, provocative, and honest. However, others say the story just stops and is less than uplifting.

"The writing is great, characters are wonderfully drawn and the story is moving while devoid of any sentimentality...." Read more

"...My only disappointment was that there isn't much of an ending . The story just stops." Read more

"Tender. Provocative. Amusing. Honest. Exploring life through authentic story telling with moments of thought-provoking ideas and confessions about..." Read more

"This book is missing the ending ; it stops at oh 190" Read more

Customers find the book dismal, weird, and not very satisfying. They also say the writing is fine but not wonderful.

"...On the whole, it felt unsatisfying . Perhaps it was too dismal for my taste?At any rate, disappointed." Read more

"...Just couldn't feel it. The writing is fine, though not wonderful ...." Read more

"weird and not very satisfying ..." Read more

Reviews with images

Book is missing pages

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Registry & Gift List
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Unfortunately, your access has now expired. But there’s good news—by subscribing today, you will receive 22 issues of Booklist magazine, 4 issues of Book Links, and single-login access to Booklist Online and over 200,000 reviews.

Your access to Booklist Online has expired. If you still subscribe to the print magazine, please proceed to your profile page and check your subscriber number against a current magazine mailing label. (If your print subscription has lapsed, you will need to renew. )

Free Trial , activate profile , or subscribe

• Newsletters
• Book Awards
• Current Issue
• Past Issues
• Booklist Online Exclusives
• Booklist Reader
• Search Archive Database
• Sign Up for Newsletters
• Booklist Online Exclusives Archives
• All Things Audio Archives
• Corner Shelf Reference
• Booklist Reader Updates
• Upcoming Webinars
• Webinar Archive
• Shelf Care Podcast Full Episodes
• The Shelf Care Podcast Author Interviews
• Advisory Board & Staff
• Write for Us
• Get Reviewed
• Customer Service