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2022 Wodehouse Prize (nominee)
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
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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
“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
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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"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's as likely to make you laugh out loud as cry." - Jonathan Safran Foer
"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 having to leave it." - Angie Kim
"In the backdrop of the pandemic, Gary Shteyngart gathers his memorable characters in a shelter where they cook, seduce, and reconsider life’s meaning. A modern-day Boccaccio, Shteyngart offers both heartbreak and hilarity in life’s travails and black swans. 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
"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
"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. Gary Shteyngart has written an American comic Decameron, or, to be plain: a masterpiece." - Andrew Sean Greer
"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 having to leave it." - Angie Kim
"In the backdrop of the pandemic, Gary Shteyngart gathers his memorable characters in a shelter where they cook, seduce, and reconsider life’s meaning. A modern-day Boccaccio, Shteyngart offers both heartbreak and hilarity in life’s travails and black swans. 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
"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
"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. Gary Shteyngart has written an American comic Decameron, or, to be plain: a masterpiece." - Andrew Sean Greer
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