Our Country Friends
Books | Fiction / Literary
3.4
(68)
Gary Shteyngart
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 ReviewsFinalist for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction • Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize • “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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More Details:
Author
Gary Shteyngart
Pages
496
Publisher
National Geographic Books
Published Date
2022-01-25
ISBN
0593503864 9780593503867
Community ReviewsSee all
"I liked but didn’t love this. As a chronicle of a particular kind of covid experience (quarantining with a pod), I thought it was effective, and I liked the central friendship between Sasha, Karen, and Vinod. It was funny and moving. I think the problem for me is that a lot of the thematic richness comes from literary references that I didn’t get! Worth picking up if you like flawed characters, satire, want to read a book that captures one of experience of the pandemic, or if you like Chekhov. "
"I enjoyed this book for the most part but the last 50 or so pages really dragged. I did not care for the flashbacks/dream chapters at all. "
M
Meredith