For October we’re reading The Friend: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez. After her best friend and mentor’s suicide, a writing professor is bequeathed his well-behaved beast of a dog. Apollo is a majestic, if aging, Great Dane, whom her friend found abandoned and kept, against the rather reasonable protests of his third and final wife. And so, in the midst of her overwhelming grief for the man whose life has anchored hers, the main character agrees to take in the animal, despite the clear terms of her rent-stabilized lease. Apollo, too, is grieving, in his doggy way—after his master’s death. The two become unlikely companions in mourning, eventually forming a bond only grieving can create.