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A poignant, sharp-eyed, and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart, told through the eyes of their wondrous ten-year-old daughter, by the bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Our Country Friends.
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original.
Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.
Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to What Maisie Knew, Henry James's classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, Vera, or Faith demonstrates why Shteyngart is, in the words of The New York Times, "one of his generation's most exhilarating writers."
"A brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country... . Shteyngart's particular flavor of black humor—Russian wry?—reconnects with its roots in sorrow and resistance and becomes essential and lifesaving. Shteyngart is doing his most important work ever, illuminating the current tragedy with humor, smarts, and heart." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Shteyngart's reliable prescience and pessimistic wit are on full display in this affecting drama of a slightly more unsettling world than ours, one where a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution would give a five-thirds vote to citizens whose roots go back to the colonial era." —Publishers Weekly
"The clever satire, sociopolitical skewering, and nimble wordplay are quintessential Shteyngart. Vera (which means 'faith' in Russian) is a wonderfully sympathetic character. This is another winner from a distinctive voice." —Booklist
"Reliably entertaining and incisive." —The Washington Post
"Through Vera's eyes, Shteyngart creates a comic masterpiece that questions everything from politics to the way we adapt to change." —Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Vera, or Faith is very funny, very sad, very sharp, and completely delightful—peak Shteyngart!" —Elif Batuman, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Idiot
"In its swirls of emotion, its humor, its pathos, and the unsparing humanity of its vision, Vera, or Faith is like some fabulous, hitherto-unknown creature that's been let out of its bottle and set free. It begins to seem that there's nothing Gary Shteyngart can't do." —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Day and The Hours
"Vera, or Faith is a novel that you can read in one sitting that will stay with you forever. Gary Shteyngart's sentences are works of art, and his humor feels medicinal at this turbulent hour in our fractured America. Vera instantly became one of my favorite child narrators, and her lucid bewilderment is by turns poignant, funny, and wise. Vera's story is at once signature Shteyngart—laugh-out-loud funny and stylistically daring—while also breaking new ground. I loved this heartfelt and vulnerable exploration of the secret cargo that Vera must carry, the detective work that she must do to piece together her social reality and family history, and the howl of grief and love at this novel's heart." —Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Swamplandia!
This information about Vera, or Faith was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was one of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year. His novel Super Sad True Love Story won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and became one of the most iconic novels of the decade. His memoir, Little Failure, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His most recent novel is the New York Times bestseller Our Country Friends. His books have been published in thirty countries. He lives in New York with his wife and son.
Link to Gary Shteyngart's Website
Name Pronunciation
Gary Shteyngart: SHTAYN-gahrt (first syllable rhymes with mine, second with heart)
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