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Vera, or Faith: A Novel Audiobook
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A poignant 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
LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, Washington Post, NPR, Oprah Daily, Vox, Denver Public Library, Seattle Times, The Cap Times, Kirkus Reviews
“Pull up a beach chair: The book of the summer is here. . . . A poignant Harriet the Spy–esque delight.”—People (Book of the Week)
“Genius . . . [a] miracle.”—The Washington Post
“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 brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A must-read.”—Los Angeles Times
“Shteyngart is one of the best comedians in literature today.”—BookPage (starred review)
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."
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"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!
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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 -
I consider myself a Gary Shteyngart superfan, but he has outdone himself with the charming, hilarious, and deeply moving Vera, or Faith. Vera is everything I want in a character—funny, curious, wise, and wildly original. She'll make you laugh, break your heart, and fill you with hope, all at the same time. She’s easily one of my favorite characters in fiction, and this is now one of my favorite novels.
— Angie Kim, New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls and Miracle Creek -
A beautiful, extraordinary, completely brilliant book that is so humane it makes me feel more human.
— Joe Weisberg, creator of The Americans -
Vera, or Faith is very funny, very sad, very sharp, and completely delightful—peak Shteyngart!
— Elif Batuman, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Idiot -
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! -
I consider myself a Gary Shteyngart superfan, but he has outdone himself with the charming, hilarious, and deeply moving Vera, or Faith. Vera is everything I want in a character—funny, curious, wise, and wildly original. She'll make you laugh, break your heart, and fill you with hope, all at the same time. She’s easily one of my favorite characters in fiction, and this is now one of my favorite novels.
— Angie Kim, New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls and Miracle Creek -
Shteyngart’s new novel, his first since 2021’s Our Country Friends, is the story of a very volatile family in a very volatile America, filtered through the eyes of a child, who just wants to be loved (the most Shteyngartian of motivations, and the most human).
— Literary Hub, one of the “Most Anticipated Books of 2025 -
This irresistible little book is both a moving jeu d’esprit and a pocket-size war against cliché—Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin meets Daisy Ashford’s eternal 1890 classic The Young Visiters. You’ll root for ten-year-old Vera, future woman of STEM, as she makes her way through a post-post-racial, AI-enabled America in search of her truth, or at least some decent Korean food. I loved it.
— Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
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About Gary Shteyngart
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.
About Gary Shteyngart
Michael Crouch is an actor based in New York City. His audiobook narration has won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine, and Best of the Year accolades from Booklist, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. He can also be heard on national commercials, cartoons, video games, and the animé series Pokémon XY and Yu-Gi-Oh! Arc-V.