InA Feather on the Breath of God (1995), "a young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother, who meet in postwar Germany and settle in New York City. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, the narrator escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet."[11]The New York Times described Nunez's debut as "A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent."[12]
Naked Sleeper (1996) is "a novel about the inescapable and sometimes unendurable complexities of love and the family drama,"[13] in which a woman falls into an extramarital affair and attempts to understand the father who abandoned her as a child.
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998) is a mock biography of a petmarmoset belonging toLeonard andVirginia Woolf.NPR describedMitz as "[a] wry, supremely intelligent literary gem about devotion."[14]
For Rouenna (2001). "Now in her fourth and perhaps best novel to date—about a writer haunted by her brief friendship with a formerVietnam combat nurse—Nunez revisits familiarProustian territory with a frightening rigor."[15]
The Last of Her Kind (2006) follows the arc of a friendship between two women from different socioeconomic backgrounds who meet as roommates atBarnard College in 1968. Nunez has said that she wanted to write about the sixties by imagining the lives of "specific individuals who happened to come of age in that revolutionary time." Andrew O'Hehir called it "perhaps the finest [social novel] yet written about that peculiar generation of young Americans who believed their destiny was to shape history."[16]
InSalvation City (2010), a thirteen-year-old boy is orphaned in a globalflu pandemic and sent to live with anevangelical pastor and his wife. "Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness. It is about spiritual and moral growth, and the consolation of art."[17]Gary Shteyngart has said that the novel "makes one reconsider the ordering of our world."[18]
Sempre Susan: A Memoir ofSusan Sontag (2011). In 1976, while recovering from surgery, Sontag hired Nunez to type her correspondence. Nunez began dating Sontag's son,David Rieff, and moved into theUpper West Side apartment that mother and son were sharing at the time. "This detailed, nuanced account of the more private side of a complex, contradictory public figure is told with even-handed good humor and more than a little compassion. Utterly absorbing." —Lydia Davis[19]
What Are You Going Through (2020). A woman agrees to help a terminally ill friend by going away with her and seeing her through the last days of her life. The friend is planning to take a euthanasia drug rather than let cancer take its course. "It's as good asThe Friend, if not better." — Dwight Garner[23]
The Vulnerables (2023). A writer, old enough to be considered a "vulnerable" in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, pet-sits a spirited parrot named Eureka in her friends' luxury apartment. When the original petsitter, a Gen Z college student, returns to the apartment, he and the narrator strike up an unlikely friendship. "Her Wordsworthian exploration of 'how much of life is shaped by sadness for what's left behind,' her rare ability to be at once wistfully elegiac and sharply hilarious makeThe Vulnerables a gift."[24]
"Shakespeare for Survivors" (review ofStation Eleven, a novel, by Emily St. John Mandel).The New York Times Book Review, September 12, 2014.
"Two Memoirs Celebrate Muses With Four Legs" (review of two memoirs:Afterglow by Eileen Myles andFetch by Nicole J. Georges).The New York Times Book Review, September 28, 2017.
"Sex and Sincerity" (review ofCleanness, a novel, by Garth Greenwell).The New York Review of Books, June 11, 2020.
"Disorders of the Heart" (review ofTo Be a Man, a short story collection, by Nicole Krauss).The New York Review of Books, November 5, 2020.
"Lost, at Sea, at Odds" (review ofWhereabouts, a novel, by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated from the Italian by the author).The New York Review. May 27, 2021.
"Gored in the Afternoon" (review ofGetting Lost, a novel, by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer).The New York Review. November 3, 2022.
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