The Vulnerables - A Novel

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, HARPER'S BAZAAR, VOGUE AND KIRKUS REVIEWS

The New York Times bestselling, National Book Award winning author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through brings her singular voice to a story about modern life and connection

I am committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez s novels. I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative, funny good and strong company. Dwight Garner, The New York Times

With the intimacy and humor of a great conversation, this novel makes you feel smarter and more alive. People Magazine

An ode to our basic need to connect with other beings, be they human or animal, even in a global crisis that told us to stay apart. NPR


Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks wh at it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past.

Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another s distress. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez s new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.

Rezension:

Praise for The Vulnerables:

"Hilarious and deeply reflective." TIME

"I am committed, until one of us dies, to Nunez s novels. I find them ideal. They are short, wise, provocative, funny good and strong company." The New York Times

"Nunez has exhibited a gift for storytelling forms that smuggle dark matter into books, which, nonetheless, proceed with bright, good humor. They are as sophisticated as they are straightforward, as death-haunted as they are life-bringing." New York Times Magazine

"Above all, The Vulnerables is about how we navigate the bizarre and hostile climates we re still living through; how we find meaning in being there for each other in some capacity...a novel that cracks open windows and offers a reassuring breeze, reminding us that it s OK and perhaps even necessary to need each other; it s only human." San Francisco Chronicle

"Little explosions of pathos detonate periodically through this story their power e ven more impressive for the way Nunez repeatedly lulls us into the comfort of her wry, ruminative voice...The Vulnerables isn t a rejection of the novel as a form, so much as a test of its dimensions." The Washington Post

"Nunez is one of our best writers on animals and the strange, touching bonds we form with them...[Her] rare ability to be at once wistfully elegiac and sharply hilarious make The Vulnerables a gift." The Boston Globe

"Strikes the difficult balance of being both elegiac and comedic as it seeks to explore what it means to be alive during our complex moment in history. Like much of her work, Nunez s latest seeks brief and blisteringly beautiful moments of connection, which burn ever brighter amid the haunting loneliness she crafts." Chicago Review of Books

Funny and thoughtful. . .Nunez manages to make a story of mortality go down easy. Publishers Weekly

"[A] penetrating interrog ation of the nature of reading, writing, creating fiction especially in a time of widespread peril." Shelf Awareness

"Nunez s subject is the core business of being alive: the tenuous beauty of human connection, the nature of memory, the purpose of writing, the passage of time. . .the result is almost arrestingly straightforward. Spare and understated and often quite funny, the experience is less like reading fiction than like eavesdropping on someone else s brain. . . .[The Vulnerables] itself is strangely, sweetly hopeful. . .Sharp and surprisingly tender." Kirkus, STARRED review

"Nunez s ninth novel finds the dark humor in the complexities of modern life. A meditation on what it means to be alive in this moment, as much as it is an inquiry into the purpose of writing itself." W Magazine