Photo: © Brigitte Lacombe
Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction). His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.
Our Country Friends
Eight friends, one country house, four romances, and six months in isolation -- a powerful, emotionally rich novel about love, friendship, and betrayal, a book that reads like a great Russian novel, or Chekhov on the Hudson, by a novelist The New York Times calls "one of his generation's most original and exhilarating writers"
It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. 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 reevaulate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters include: 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 young flame-thrower of an essayist, originally from the Carolinas; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.
In a remarkable literary feat, Gary Shteyngart has documented through fiction the emotional toll of our recent times: a story of love and friendship that reads like a great Russian novel set in upstate New York. 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.
Praise
“There cannot be a more relevant novel for our moment, certainly not one with such beauty of description, depth of feeling, and, as always, humor. Shteyngart has written an American comic Decameron, or, to be plain: a masterpiece.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
“You can retreat from global catastrophe but your private calamities will come and find you. Gary Shteyngart’s most moving novel, Chekhov and Boccaccio reimagined in America in the year of the pandemic, is a powerful fable of our broken time.” — Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight's Children
“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 as likely to make you laugh out loud as cry.”—Jonathan Safran Foer, bestselling author of Everything Is Illuminated and I Am Here
Events
Come see Gary Shteyngart on tour as he discusses Our Country Friends!
More from Gary Shteyngart
Lake Success
The bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story returns with a biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times.
Little Failure
New York Times Bestseller
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
The all too true story of an immigrant family betting its future on America, as told by a lifelong misfit who finally finds a place for himself in the world through books and words.
Super Sad True Love Story
New York Times Bestseller
A deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.
Absurdistan
An uproarious and poignant story of one very fat man and one very small country.
The Russian Debutante's Handbook
Both a highly imaginative romp and a serious exploration of what it means to be an immigrant in America.
Contact
Gary is all over the interwebs. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
For publicity inquiries, contact Carrie Neill (cneill@penguinrandomhouse.com) or Melissa Folds(mfolds@penguinrandomhouse.com).
To inquire about booking Gary Shteyngart for a speaking engagement, please contact the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com.
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