After her closest friend and former mentor dies by suicide, an unnamed writer inherits his enormous Great Dane.

She lives in a small New York apartment where dogs are forbidden, and the practical problem of caring for him becomes inseparable from the larger problem of grief. The book is built from memory, literary quotation, argument and digression rather than conventional plot. The narrator thinks through friendship, teaching, suicide, writing, sexual power and the hierarchy of loss. The dog is another grieving creature, unreadable yet insistently present, forcing companionship where language has failed.

Winner of the 2018 National Book Award, The Friend is sharp about the vanity and self-deception of literary life while remaining genuinely interested in what books can hold for us when ordinary consolation becomes embarrassing or impossible. It is a novel about mourning, but also about the compromises of intimacy: what we inherit from people, what we excuse in them, and what remains after they have removed themselves from the argument.

Virago Press, 2019 paperback; later printing. Very good condition with light shelf wear.