The New York Times -bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend brings her singular voice to a story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship. A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, the friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of them the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices mostly as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, and she is drawn into an intense and transformative experience of her own. With her widely acclaimed novel The Friend , Sigrid Nunez was hailed for her "confident and direct style" ( The New York Times ), her "wry, withering wit" (NPR), and "world of insight into death, grief, art, and love" ( The Wall Street Journal ). Readers rejoiced in her ability to capture the essence of grief and friendship. With What Are You Going Through , Nunez brings that same warm wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. In a surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, Nunez offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.