What Are You Going Through

2022 Longlist

A woman visits a friend with terminal cancer. Brilliant, strong-willed and alone, the friend, facing death, makes a momentous request. Will she accompany her on a holiday where she will, without warning one day, take a lethal pill to end her life on her own terms?

Shaken and grieving, she finds the strength to agree. What follows is an extraordinary story – profound, surprising and often funny – of a lifelong friendship given the ultimate challenge; to witness its end.

Utterly of our moment and timeless, What Are You Going Through is a deeply moving affirmation of life in its current existential threat and in its ordinary tragedies – the loss, loneliness, and the love that yet survives.

About the Author/Translator

 Sigrid Nunez is the bestselling author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award and shortlisted for the 2020 DUBLIN Literary Award. She has also written several other novels, including Salvation City and The Last of Her Kind, and uSempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Librarian’s Comments

The novel is a deeply humane reminder of the great solace of both companionship and literature. Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. She writes about the difficulty of accurately capturing the swarm of feelings surrounding death. The marvel of this novel is that it encompasses so much sadness yet is not grim. Stadtbüchereien Düsseldorf, Germany