New York Times bestselling author Sigrid Nunez has become one of the contemporary fiction’s most distinctive voices producing nine penetrating, profound novels celebrated by fans and critics alike. Ordinary and middle-aged women, living in cramped New York apartments feature in “It Will Come Back to You”. Elderly women, living in memory care facilities, somewhere upstate. Teenage girls, spending their summers in Connecticut, alienated by their parents. Divorcees, single mothers, daughters and grand-daughters. Women of the American middle class, women of the American proletariat. Women of the 1970s; women of the Covid-19 pandemic, Nunez who has always been a New York author, writing about the city featuring all these characters in nine novels over the course of more than 30 years. Her stories are lucid and details what it is like to grow up as a girl and watch as everyone looks at your new body, sexualising it.  In her novel there are moments of language that are very funny and very strange. In the opening story “Philosophers”, a woman reflects on her first love a man who will soon go to Vietnam but who dies after the war. While she and the man, Ace, begin their courtship, our narrator realises that their high school teacher also has feeling for him. The teacher openly flirts with him, as Nunez writes, “her foot going like crazy” as it nervously shakes with desire. The later stories tend to be bit more sentimental, such as 2025’s “The Rabbit’s Foot”, which ends with a grandmother and a granddaughter laughing and sharing a slice of cake.

“the Plan” which Nunez wrote in 2018, is an unsettling story about Roden, a man obsessed with fantasising about killing women and specifically his wife Harley. He goes so far as to come up with a plan, laid out here in its every detail: he will take her on a beautiful Caribbean vacation – a “second honeymoon” – then kill her in their hotel room. He even cheats on her. But when these anticipation are disrupted, he ends up choosing instead to kill a prostitute he regularly sees, because “whores got murdered all the time. It was one of the things whores were for”.

“The Balloon” from 1992, is the oldest story in the collection, reads like a prose poem. It is about a man, one who is perfect but also terrible. A womaniser but also not a womaniser. Our narrator is obsessed with him, and she won’t forgive him. 

In “Imagination”  Elsie, a 14-year-old in the throes of puberty, Nunez disturbingly details what it is like to grow up as a girl, and still feel like a girl, and watch as everything around you looks at your new body sexualising it for the very first time. “Perverse” is the word Elsie’s mother keeps using to describe her attitude.

It Will Come Back to You: Collected Stories by Sigrid Nunez, Virago £20/ Riverhead $29, 224 pages.