Vera, or Faith
A Novel
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Vera, or Faith
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Gary Shteyngart
About this listen
A poignant, sharp-eyed, 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
“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 Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025
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."
©2025 Gary Shteyngart (P)2025 Random House AudioCritic reviews
“Gary Shteyngart’s deeply moving new novel is the story of one American family’s efforts to defy the centrifugal forces pulling them apart. The novel gives us an unnerving—and very funny—portrait of America in the near future and an indelible portrait of its ten-year-old heroine, and attests to Shteyngart’s magic ability to write in multiple emotional octaves and his gift for both sharp-edged humor and heartfelt tenderness.”—Michiko Kakutani, author of The Great Wave
“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
“A brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country . . . Shteyngart’s particular flavor of black humor—Russian wry?—reconnects with its roots in sorrow and resistance and becomes essential and lifesaving. Shteyngart is doing his most important work ever, illuminating the current tragedy with humor, smarts, and heart.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review