Our Country Friends: A Novel

Product Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF NOVEMBER’S BEST BOOKS BY TIME, THE WASHINGTON POST, AND TOWN & COUNTRY

“A perfect novel for these times and all times, the single textual artifact from the pandemic era I would place in a time capsule as a representation of all that is good and true and beautiful about literature.”—Molly Young, The New York TimesEight friends, one country house,
and six months in isolation—a novel about love, friendship, family, and betrayal hailed as a “virtuoso performance” (USA Today)
and
“an homage to Chekhov with four romances and a finale that will break your heart” (The Washington Post)

In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family. Both elegiac and very, very funny,
Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller
Super Sad True Love Story.

Amazon.com Review

At once comic, sad, and introspective,
Our Country Friends is a literary feat. With his trademark wry humor, proclivity towards idiosyncratic characters and conversations, and the ability to explore the contradictions that live within each of us, Gary Shteyngart has written a brilliant pandemic novel. As a group of eight come together on a sprawling estate in the Hudson Valley, they reacquaint themselves with old friends and new, wrestle with past grievances, delayed dreams and romances, and even discover new ones as they quarantine together. Like Wes Anderson’s
The Grand Budapest Hotel, Shteyngart has built a tight world teeming with human emotion, entertainment, and depth.
—Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor

Review

“At turns bitingly funny and unbearably sad, it’s among the first major works of literary fiction to wrestle with the psychological, sociological and cultural impact of the pandemic, and marks a new, more reflective register for Shteyngart.”
—The New York Times

“Shteyngart knows how to make you belly laugh, and he’s in his element here, poking fun at the claustrophobia of privilege. He perfectly captures the nature of adult friendships and the petty jealousies, disappointments, and dependencies that can define them.”
—Vulture

“In the backdrop of the pandemic, Gary Shteyngart gathers his memorable characters in a shelter, where they cook, seduce, and reconsider life’s meaning. . . . Like
The Decameron, Shteyngart’s
Our Country Friends reminds us that even in darkness, light promises to return if we reach for love and art.”
—Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, finalist for the National Book Award 
“Gary Shteyngart is a national treasure. He has always written with great humor and heart, but never more so than here. Be careful reading this book in public; it is as likely to make you laugh out loud as cry.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Here I Am
“I cannot say enough how much I loved
Our Country Friends. It’s a tragicomic tour de force about so many things—sex, infatuation, the pandemic, kimchi, racism, immigration, adoption, stalking, Russian writers, K-pop, Japanese reality TV, writing—but most of all, it’s about how we create, sever, and mend lifelong bonds of friendship, how we wound and heal those we love most. It’s the rare book that, when you turn to the last page, leaves you grateful to the author for creating this world and allowing you in for a time, but also a little sad, filled with regret at h