The Vulnerables

National Book Award winner Nunez (The Friend) returns with a funny and thoughtful story of the Covid-19 pandemic’s early months. As the virus breaks out in New York City, a fictional Nunez lends her apartment to a volunteer aid worker and moves into friend-of-a-friend Iris’s spacious apartment, where she cares for a pet macaw while Iris is stuck in California due to lockdown measures. Nunez enjoys her time alone with the bird, Eureka, and ventures out for walks. One day, Iris’s previous bird sitter, an NYU student she wrongly calls Vetch, in retaliation for his inability to remember her own name, appears at the apartment. Nunez and Vetch split duties and slowly warm to each other’s quirks, as she learns why he was kicked out of his parents’ house. Nunez, who narrates, adds a tongue-in-cheek metafictional element as she considers ways to distance herself from the material, such as by using a pen name (her spell-check program suggests Sugared Nouns, a distortion of her own name). Episodic in nature (like much of pandemic life), the novel shuffles about in fits and starts as Nunez grapples with writer’s block and the fear of getting sick, though her pacing is as swift as her wit. Once again, Nunez manages to make a story of mortality go down easy. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency. (Nov.)