Yes it’s a new Sigrid Nunez novel with an animal on the cover and the book is about the death of a friend. But it’s not the same! First off, this has cats, but it’s not about cats. Not really. “The cat came in on little fog feet.” The book is about a narrator who has been asked to help a friend live out the remaining days after her cancer has returned. She was in remission, and the experimental treatments worked, and so the pain […]

In the beginning, I did not like this book. One of the main characters is a giant puppy but I felt like I was being slapped in the face with pretentiousness in every paragraph. None of the characters had names. The narrator was a writer describing all her writer friends – and talking endlessly about famous writers. Writers writing about writers writing about writers just never ends well. But somewhere, and I’m not sure where, I turned the corner. It must have been the dog. […]