Overnight successes are rare in book publishing. For every talented first-timer like Zadie Smith, Khaled Hosseini, or Ann-Marie MacDonald, there are thousands of worthy authors putting out novel after novel without a single visit to the bestseller lists.
Author Sigrid Nunez achieved a peculiar kind of overnight success when her 2018 novel “The Friend” won the National Book Award and became a huge bestseller — peculiar because “The Friend” was the eighth book by Nunez, who was in her late 60s at the time. “The Friend” was followed by 2020s “What Are You Going Through” and her newest book, “The Vulnerables.” Like the previous two novels, “The Vulnerables” doesn’t have much of a plot: basically, an elderly New York writer spends much of the pandemic apartment-sitting for a friend who owns a parrot. What readers get instead are the deeply intelligent, wide-ranging, and completely charming thoughts and opinions of the unnamed …