
Vera, or Faith
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Shannon Tyo
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Gary Shteyngart
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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 MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Bustle, Vulture, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Book Riot, Publishers Weekly, Literary Hub, AV Club, Hey Alma
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Shteyngart’s work is always saturated with humor and heart, and his latest novel offers a new perspective on one of literature’s most prominent subjects: How can a family survive in America? . . . Shteyngart is excellent at capturing the difficult places where emotional bonds grow thin even as love remains potent.”—Vulture
“Reliably entertaining and incisive.”—The Washington Post
“Through Vera’s eyes, Shteyngart creates a comic masterpiece that questions everything from politics to the way we adapt to change.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
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Story
Alice isn't like the other Storm siblings. While the rest stayed to battle for their parents' approval, attention, and untold billions, she left, building her own life beyond the family’s name and influence. Nothing could induce her to come back, except the shocking death of her larger-than-life father. Now back on the family’s private island off the Rhode Island coast, she plans to keep her head down, pay the last of her respects, and leave the minute the funeral is over. Unfortunately, her father had other plans.
By: Sarah MacLean
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Loved One
- A Novel
- By: Aisha Muharrar
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When her first love and friend of more than a decade, Gabe, dies suddenly at twenty-nine, thirty-year-old Julia is launched onto an intercontinental quest to recover his lost possessions. Her journey takes her from Los Angeles to London and into the murky realm of the past, which seems to offer more questions than answers about who Gabe really was, and who they were to each other.
By: Aisha Muharrar
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El Dorado Drive
- By: Megan Abbott
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
All I want is to be innocent again. But that's not how it works. Especially not after the Wheel. The three Bishop sisters grew up in privilege in the moneyed suburbs of Detroit. But as the auto industry declined, so did their fortunes. Harper, the youngest, is barely making ends meet when her beloved, charismatic sister Pam—currently in the middle of a contentious battle with her ex-husband—and her eldest sister, Debra, approach her about joining an exciting new club.
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Repetitive buildup
- By ME Newport on 06-29-25
By: Megan Abbott
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Absurdistan
- By: Gary Shteyngart
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Named as one of the New York Times Year’s Ten Best upon its publication, Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan is a biting, poignant satire of American-style democracy and the American Dream. After returning to Russia to attend his father’s funeral, 30-year-old Misha is subsequently denied a visa when he attempts to re-enter the United States.
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Major Let Down
- By N. R. Gawlak on 03-03-14
By: Gary Shteyngart
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Bring the House Down
- A Novel
- By: Charlotte Runcie
- Narrated by: Isabelle Farah
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Alex Lyons always has his mind made up by the time the curtain comes down at a performance—the show either deserves a five-star rave or a one-star pan. Anything in between is meaningless. On the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he doesn’t deliberate over the rating for Hayley Sinclair’s show, nor does he hesitate when the opportunity presents itself to have a one-night stand with the struggling actress.
By: Charlotte Runcie
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Flashlight
- A Novel
- By: Susan Choi
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 17 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past.
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Excellent story & narration
- By Rachel on 06-28-25
By: Susan Choi
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Among Friends
- A Novel
- By: Hal Ebbott
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It’s an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host’s fifty-second birthday. Together, the group forms an enviable portrait of middle age. The wives and husbands have been friends for over thirty years, their teenage daughters have grown up together, and the dinners, games, and rituals forming their days all reflect the rich bonds between them.
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Boredom
- By Avid series reader on 06-28-25
By: Hal Ebbott
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Bug Hollow
- A Novel
- By: Michelle Huneven
- Narrated by: Emily Rankin
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later. From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep.
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Breezy but not deep
- By Mother Of Hope on 06-24-25
By: Michelle Huneven
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A Marriage at Sea
- A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
- By: Sophie Elmhirst
- Narrated by: Marisa Calin
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream – as we all dream – of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away? Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But Maurice began to study nautical navigation. Maralyn made detailed lists of provisions. And in June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank.
By: Sophie Elmhirst
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Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar
- By: Katie Yee
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie. A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie. Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation.
By: Katie Yee
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That's How They Get You
- An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor
- By: Damon Young
- Narrated by: Damon Young, André Santana, Cary Hite, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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A critic explores the paradox of finding community in “the dozens” while grieving. A violent town ritual causes an all-too-familiar moral panic. An email thread between friends on why we need an updated Green Book but for public toilets. All across the nation, “Karens” become illegal overnight. These are just a few of the hilarious worlds contained in Damon Young’s groundbreaking anthology featuring the best, funniest, and Blackest essays, short stories, letters, and rants.
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What an incredibly thoughtful look into the world of black humor.
- By LA Milton on 06-29-25
By: Damon Young