A haunting novel of war, memory and unlikely friendship, from the National Book Award–winning author of The Friend.
After the publication of her first book, a New York writer receives a letter from a stranger: Rouenna Zycinski, once a combat nurse in Vietnam, who wants help telling the story of the war year that defined her life. The writer declines — and then finds she cannot stop thinking about Rouenna: her bluntness, her loneliness, her working-class Staten Island world so unlike the literary one the narrator now inhabits.
What follows is a friendship neither woman quite intended, and — after tragedy intervenes — the book the narrator once refused to write. Moving between downtown New York and the evacuation hospitals of Vietnam, For Rouenna is Nunez at her most quietly devastating: a novel about who gets remembered, who does the remembering, and what writers owe the people who trust them with their lives.
About the author
Sigrid Nunez won the National Book Award for The Friend. This acclaimed early novel is reissued by Virago alongside Mitz and Naked Sleeper — all three on our shelves.
