Author Guide · Literary Fiction
Books Written by
Sigrid Nunez, born in New York City in 1951 to a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father, published her first book in her forties. Before that she was an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books and, for a time, lived in the household of Susan Sontag. Her seventh novel, The Friend, about a woman who inherits her dead mentor’s Great Dane, won the National Book Award in 2018. In 2024 two of her novels reached the cinema in the same year, one of them as Pedro Almodóvar’s Golden Lion winner The Room Next Door. In 2026, at 75, she published her first collection of stories. This guide covers her 11 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 key books · 1995–2026 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, a memoir and a story collection. Her best-known books are The Friend (2018), which won the National Book Award, What Are You Going Through (2020) and The Vulnerables (2023). Start with The Friend; read on for the earlier novels, her memoir of Susan Sontag and the two films made from her work.
Where to Start with Sigrid Nunez
If you want her defining book
→ The Friend (2018) — grief, writing and a very large dog.
If you want the novel behind Almodóvar’s film
→ What Are You Going Through (2020) — the basis of The Room Next Door.
If you want her autobiographical beginnings
→ A Feather on the Breath of God (1995) — her first book, about a New York childhood.
If you want to know about Susan Sontag
→ Sempre Susan (2011) — a short memoir of living with her.
11 Sigrid Nunez Books, in Order
A Feather on the Breath of God
Her first book, a short novel in four parts about a girl growing up in a New York housing project: her Chinese-Panamanian father, her German mother, her years of ballet, and later a love affair with a Russian immigrant to whom she teaches English. It draws closely on Nunez’s own family.
Naked Sleeper
Her second novel follows Nell, a New York writer in a settled marriage, who is drawn into an affair with a man from her past. It is a book about desire and restlessness in middle life.
Mitz
A comic, closely researched novel about the real marmoset that lived with Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the 1930s. Through the pet’s life Nunez gives a sideways portrait of the Woolfs’ marriage, their household and the years leading up to the Second World War.
For Rouenna
A novelist is contacted by Rouenna, a woman from the housing project where they both grew up, who served as an Army nurse in the Vietnam War and wants her story told. The book becomes the narrator’s attempt to write that life, and a reflection on who gets to tell whose story.
The Last of Her Kind
Two women meet as roommates at Barnard in 1968: Georgette, from a poor upstate family, and Ann, a wealthy girl who rejects her privilege. The novel follows their friendship across decades, through radical politics and Ann’s imprisonment for killing a police officer.
Salvation City
After a flu pandemic kills his parents, a teenage boy, Cole, is taken in by an evangelical pastor and his wife in a small Indiana town called Salvation City. Raised by secular parents, he has to make sense of a family that is waiting for the Rapture.
Sempre Susan
A short memoir of Susan Sontag, whom Nunez met in the 1970s while working at The New York Review of Books. She lived for a time in Sontag’s apartment with Sontag and her son, David Rieff, and writes about Sontag’s generosity, her demands and her influence on a young writer.
The Friend
When a writer and teacher takes his own life, the narrator, his friend and former student, is left with his Great Dane, Apollo, though dogs are banned from her small Manhattan apartment. In short sections that move between grief, reading and the craft of writing, the novel won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. A film version with Naomi Watts and Bill Murray followed in 2024.
What Are You Going Through
A woman listens to the people around her, from a stranger to an ex-lover lecturing about climate disaster, until an old friend with terminal cancer asks her to stay with her while she ends her life. The title comes from Simone Weil. Pedro Almodóvar adapted it as The Room Next Door (2024), with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore.
The Vulnerables
During the first Covid lockdown in spring 2020, a writer in her sixties moves into a luxury Manhattan apartment to look after a macaw named Eureka, and has to share it with a young man who turns up there. The novel is her ninth, about solitude, care and how strangers come to depend on one another.
It Will Come Back to You
Her first book of short stories, published by Riverhead in July 2026: thirteen stories from across her career, including “The Naked Juror”, “Airport Story” and “Greensleeves”. The title story, first published in the London Review of Books in 2021, closes the book.
In What Order to Read Sigrid Nunez
None of Nunez’s novels continues another, so they can be read in any order. The Friend, What Are You Going Through and The Vulnerables are often read as a loose trio: each has an unnamed woman writer in New York as narrator, each moves in short sections, and each turns on care for someone, or something, else.
Her earlier books are more conventional in form. A Feather on the Breath of God shows where her material comes from, and Sempre Susan explains the writer who shaped her. It Will Come Back to You gathers stories written across the same decades.
A reading path
1. The Friend (2018)
2. What Are You Going Through (2020)
3. The Vulnerables (2023)
4. A Feather on the Breath of God (1995)
5. Sempre Susan (2011)
The years · 1951–2026
Quick facts about Sigrid Nunez
- Known for
- Sigrid Nunez is known for short, plain-spoken novels narrated by women writers in New York, about grief, friendship, dying and the comfort of animals and books.
- 1951
- Born in New York City
- 1972
- BA from Barnard College
- 2018
- The Friend
- 2026
- First story collection
- Born
- 1951, New York City; German mother, Chinese-Panamanian father
- Education
- Barnard College (BA, 1972); Columbia University (MFA, 1975)
- Worked
- Editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books; has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University and the New School
- Prizes
- National Book Award for Fiction (2018); Windham-Campbell Prize (2025); Whiting Award; Rome Prize
- Member
- American Academy of Arts and Letters
- Translations
- Her work has been translated into 35 languages
The red mark is 2018: The Friend, which won the National Book Award for Fiction.
How Sigrid Nunez Writes: Short Sections, Plain Sentences
Her later novels are built from short blocks of prose, some a single paragraph, separated by white space. A scene from the narrator’s day sits next to a passage from a writer she has been reading, a memory of a class she taught, or a story someone has told her. The connections are left for the reader to make.
The narrators are usually unnamed women writers in New York, close to Nunez in age and life, which has made readers ask how much is autobiography. Nunez keeps the question open: in The Friend the narrator talks about the problems of writing from life, and For Rouenna is a whole novel about the right to tell someone else’s story.
Her subjects are large — suicide, assisted dying, a pandemic — but the sentences are calm and often funny, and much of the attention goes to small acts of care: walking a dog, feeding a parrot, sitting in the next room. For writers who work in a similar fragmentary, first-person way, see Rachel Cusk and Jenny Offill.
Frequently asked questions about Sigrid Nunez’s books
How many books has Sigrid Nunez written?
Eleven: nine novels, from A Feather on the Breath of God (1995) to The Vulnerables (2023), the memoir Sempre Susan (2011) and the story collection It Will Come Back to You (2026). All 11 are listed on this page.
What are Sigrid Nunez’s books in order?
A Feather on the Breath of God (1995), Naked Sleeper (1996), Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998), For Rouenna (2001), The Last of Her Kind (2006), Salvation City (2010), Sempre Susan (2011), The Friend (2018), What Are You Going Through (2020), The Vulnerables (2023) and It Will Come Back to You (2026).
Where should I start with Sigrid Nunez?
With The Friend (2018). It is short, it won the National Book Award, and it shows the form she uses in all her later novels. If you like it, go on to What Are You Going Through.
What is Sigrid Nunez’s most famous book?
The Friend, the 2018 novel about a woman who takes in her dead mentor’s Great Dane. It won the National Book Award for Fiction and became a New York Times bestseller.
Is The Friend by Sigrid Nunez a film?
Yes. The Friend (2024), directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, stars Naomi Watts as the narrator and Bill Murray as her mentor.
Which Sigrid Nunez book is The Room Next Door based on?
What Are You Going Through (2020). Pedro Almodóvar’s film The Room Next Door (2024), with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, won the Golden Lion at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.
Where does the title What Are You Going Through come from?
From the French philosopher Simone Weil, who wrote that loving one’s neighbour fully means being able to ask him: “What are you going through?”
Did Sigrid Nunez know Susan Sontag?
Yes. She met Sontag in the 1970s while working at The New York Review of Books and lived for a time in her apartment with Sontag and her son, David Rieff. She wrote about those years in Sempre Susan (2011).
What prizes has Sigrid Nunez won?
The National Book Award for Fiction in 2018 for The Friend, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction in 2025. She has also received a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature and a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Is Sigrid Nunez still alive?
Yes. She was born in New York City in 1951, still lives there, and published her first story collection, It Will Come Back to You, in 2026.
Footnotes
- Sigrid Nunez — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Sigrid Nunez — Wikipedia (mirror)
- Sigrid Nunez’s story collection — The Boston Globe, 2026
- It Will Come Back to You — Bookreporter review
- Sigrid Nunez — Bookreporter author page
- Sigrid Nunez — Conrad Festival
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Aren’t we all unreliable narrators of our own lives?”
— Sigrid Nunez, “It Will Come Back to You”, in It Will Come Back to You (2026)
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