An intimate portrait of the life and marriage of Leonard and Virginia Woolf - and their pet marmoset monkey called Mitz - from the National Book Award-winning author of THE FRIEND

In 1934, a "sickly pathetic marmoset" named Mitz came into the care of Leonard Woolf. After he nursed her back to health, she became a ubiquitous presence in Bloomsbury society. Moving with Leonard and Virginia Woolf between London and Sussex, she developed her own special relationship with each of them, as well as with their cocker spaniels and with various members of the Woolfs' circle, among them T. S. Eliot and Vita Sackville-West.

Never before published in the UK, this tender and imaginative mock biography uses letters, diaries, memoirs, and other archival documents to offer a striking look at the lives of writers and artists shadowed by war, death, and mental breakdown, and at the solace and amusement inspired by its tiny subject.

'A wry, supremely intelligent literary gem about devotion - to writing, to other people, and between humans and their pets. Like The Friend, Mitz captures the heartrending downside of love and connection - loss. But it also reminds us, beautifully, of the "great solace and distraction" of literature' NPR

'In short, glistening sentences that refract the larger world, Ms. Nunez describes the appealingly eccentric, fiercely intelligent Woolfs during a darkening time' WALL STREET JOURNAL

'Once you discover Sigrid Nunez, you don't look back' ANNE ENRIGHT