http://www.npr.org/2018/11/24/670513615/book-review-the-friend-wins-2018-national-book-award-for-fiction [remainder of review can be read here]

Book Review: ‘The Friend’ Wins 2018 National Book Award For Fiction

November 24, 20187:52 AM ET

Heard on  Weekend Edition Saturday

NPR’s Scott Simon speaks with author Sigrid Nunez about her novel, “The Friend,” which just won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST: 

“The Friend,” by Sigrid Nunez, is a taut, tight, lyrical little novel on the enormous questions of love, loss and art and even the question of how to love an enormous dog – in this case, a Great Dane named Apollo who the unnamed narrator takes into her meager Manhattan apartment following the suicide of his master who was her former, teacher, mentor, lover and friend. “The Friend” just won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. And Sigrid Nunez, who’s taught at Princeton, Amherst, The New School and other universities and is the author of eight acclaimed novels, joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

SIGRID NUNEZ: Thank you for having me.

SIMON: And congratulations.

NUNEZ: Thank you.

SIMON: Apollo is a gift, although, at first, he doesn’t appear to be so, from wife No. 3 of the writer who has taken his life. And why doesn’t the narrator say, come on now, I live in a, you know, 200-square-foot apartment, I can’t do this?

NUNEZ: Well, she does try to say that, and wife three will not accept that. And it becomes clear that no one else is going to take this dog. And so the narrator – actually, it’s a 500-square-foot apartment. But also it’s a place where in the lease, it is specified that no dogs are allowed.

SIMON: Yeah.

NUNEZ: So that’s an even more important issue.

[use the URL above to read the remainder of this interview]