Vera, Or Faith
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- $229.00
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- $229.00
Descripción editorial
'A novel you can read in one sitting that will stay with you forever' Karen Russell
'Very funny, very sad, very sharp, and completely delightful' Elif Batuman
'A classic American road adventure. Gary Shteyngart keeps getting better' Literary Review
'Genius... A miracle' Washington Post
'Pull up a beach chair: The book of the summer is here... A poignant Harriet the Spy-esque delight' People
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love each other 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 21st 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 give 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: 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 wondrous 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, Gary Shteyngart's newest novel is among his best and shows why, in the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, he is 'a national treasure'.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A blended family negotiates internal and external tensions in the affecting and lightly speculative latest from Shteyngart (Our Country Friends). At 10, Vera Shmulkin is a sponge for language. She keeps a running journal of phrases spoken by her Russian immigrant father, Igor, a public intellectual and "manfluencer" who worries the family will lose their "merely rich" status in billionaire-friendly New York City if he fails to sell the "once-famous" magazine he's attempting to rehab. Meanwhile, Vera's Boston Brahman stepmother, Anne Mom, leads a resistance group against a proposed constitutional amendment that would supercharge enfranchisement for citizens such as Anne, whose family tree stretches back to the colonial era, but would marginalize Igor and Vera, the latter because her birth mother, Mom Mom, whom Vera never knew, came from Korea. After Igor fails to show at Anne's fundraiser, their fights and Igor's heavy drinking worry Vera, who becomes convinced that her father is a Russian spy. The various plotlines are provocative and clever, but most are underdeveloped save for Vera's determination to track down Mom Mom, which builds to a dramatic climax and satisfying conclusion. Readers will go all in for this story's singular heroine.
