NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Time, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Town & Country, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews “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 Times (Editors’ Choice) Eight 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.
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“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.”
— New York Times
“The Great American Pandemic Novel only Shteyngart could write, full of hyphenated identities, killer prose, and wild vitality.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Shteyngart’s big-hearted drama is timely yet timeless with its penetrating and nuanced social commentary exploring identity, racism, celebrity culture, social media, and humanity…[and] love in its many registers.”
— Booklist (starred review)“Shteyngart knows how to make you belly laugh, and he’s in his element here, poking fun at the claustrophobia of privilege.”
— VultureBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Gary Shteyngart is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestselling memoir Little Failure, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the novel Super Sad True Love Story, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been translated into twenty-nine languages.
Rob Shapiro is a musician, writer, voice actor, and Earphones Award–winning narrator. He performed several seasons of radio comedy on Minneapolis Public Radio and voiced the titular lion in Leo the Lion. He is a musician and composer with his critically acclaimed band Populuxe. He is also a business consultant and software system designer.