Hope for the best

Celebrated author continues her exploration of loneliness and loss in a novel set in pandemic times.

- HELENA WIŚNIEWSKA BROW

At a book event earlier this year, US author Sigrid Nunez laughingly recalled a graduate student of hers who had read all her novels and had one question to ask: Did she make some of that stuff up? It's the same anecdote repeated by Nunez's narrator in her latest and characteristically genre-defying book, The Vulnerables. And it is delivered with a knowing wink. "Some writers use pen names so that they can be more truthful," she says. "Others, so that they can tell more lies."

The great pleasure for the reader is that this celebrated writer is a master of both. The Vulnerables isn't memoir, even though much of it reads like one. It's the third in a series of novels in which a narrator not unlike Nunez - a writer of a certain age who lives alone in New York meditates on love, loneliness, loss and, of course, the act of writing.