What Are You Going Through
Books | Fiction / Friendship
4
Sigrid Nunez
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY NPR, PEOPLE, AND O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS’ TOP BOOK OF 2020 NATIONAL BESTSELLER “As good as The Friend, if not better.” —The New York Times “Impossible to put down . . . leavened with wit and tenderness.” —People “I was dazed by the novel’s grace.” —The New Yorker The New York Times–bestselling, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend brings her singular voice to a story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own. In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.
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Author
Sigrid Nunez
Pages
224
Publisher
Penguin
Published Date
2020-09-08
ISBN
0593191439 9780593191439
Community ReviewsSee all
"I made it almost half way (2 hours - it’s short!) into the audiobook and just could not connect or bring myself to care enough to finish. The fact that every character (whether an actual character or someone the (unnamed) narrator referenced) was unnamed annoyed me and it seemed to just be rambling thoughts more than actual story. I had to check the cover image to make sure it wasn’t non-fiction when I started. I can appreciate the author’s skilled writing but the style did not work for me."
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Gretchen Nord