It Will Come Back to You takes in thirteen stories – never before collected together – from a career spanning three decades, which has seen Nunez become one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive voices. Moving from an inappropriate teenage crush to a therapist’s second chance at love, in this collection Nunez maintains her irrepressible humour, bite, and insight, while exploring the philosophical questions we have come to expect from her writing.
Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018. Her most recent book is What Are You Going Through, a novel.
Read: It Will Come Back to You, London Review of Books
First lines: ‘Apple’ and ‘sheep’: of the five words the neurologist asked me to remember the first time I saw him I still remember two. Remember these words, he said to me at the beginning of the exam. And at the end of the exam, about twenty minutes later, he asked me to recite them back to him. The truth is, I had memorised them by silently repeating them to myself throughout the exam. I didn’t mean to cheat; it was a reflex. The reflex of a lifelong panicky tester. Another thing the neurologist had asked me to do was to count backwards by sevens, which made my pulse race because I am also all but innumerate.