
Mitz
The Marmoset of Bloomsbury
Sigrid Nunez(Author)
Virago Press Ltd
Will be published approx. on 14. July 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
176 pages
978-0-349-02146-1 (ISBN)
Description
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
'A perfect little gem of a book' NIGEL NICOLSON
'Nunez takes us beneath the surface to the essential mysteries of the human heart' WALL STREET JOURNAL
In 1934, a 'sickly pathetic marmoset' came into the care of Leonard Woolf. After he nursed her back to health, Mitz 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.
This tender and imaginative mock biography offers 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' NPR
'At its very best the book takes on the edginess of Mrs. Dalloway' CHICAGO TRIBUNE
'In plumbing the mysterious affections between species, it comes to represent the solace and fragility of human relations more generally' PARIS REVIEW
Winner of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
'A perfect little gem of a book' NIGEL NICOLSON
'Nunez takes us beneath the surface to the essential mysteries of the human heart' WALL STREET JOURNAL
In 1934, a 'sickly pathetic marmoset' came into the care of Leonard Woolf. After he nursed her back to health, Mitz 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.
This tender and imaginative mock biography offers 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' NPR
'At its very best the book takes on the edginess of Mrs. Dalloway' CHICAGO TRIBUNE
'In plumbing the mysterious affections between species, it comes to represent the solace and fragility of human relations more generally' PARIS REVIEW
Winner of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Reviews / Votes
A charming, airy, and disarmingly melancholy novel [that] makes of Bloomsbury a kind of snow globe-diminutive, self-contained, beautifully agitated-within which major and minor figures are given room to float past at their leisure * Paris Review * 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 * Mitz shimmers with an emotional truth missing from the most rigorous Bloomsbury histories * Village Voice * At its very best the book takes on the edginess of Mrs. Dalloway * Chicago Tribune * A lesson to all of us who foolishly believed that Flush exhausted the unpromising genre of pet biography, Mitz takes Flush back to the muse, the marmoset that briefly belonged to Virginia and Leonard Woolf. In prose so lucid, so supple, so exquisitely entertaining we only slowly realize we are in the presence of art, Sigrid Nunez constructs a diagram of love and solicitude and abiding solitude: Mitz is tender, astute, wise, funny, and deeply, unsentimentally sad-for all its charm, a novel of masterly formal intelligence * Rosenthal Family Foundation Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Little, Brown Book Group
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 126 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-349-02146-1 (9780349021461)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
approx. 07/2026
Virago Press
€6.49
Not yet available
Person
Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. Nunez is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. The Friend has been adapted for film by directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee (2024). What Are You Going Through has been adapted for a film directed by Pedro Almodovar, The Room Next Door (2024). Her work has been published in more than thirty five countries.