Vera, or Faith

A Novel

De: Gary Shteyngart

Narrado por: Shannon Tyo, Gary Shteyngart

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."

Lovely, delightful

This is a quiet, seemingly simple, seemingly light-read book that says so much more than the sum of its words, and packs a wallop. I will be thinking about it for a long time. The narrator was truly excellent. Loved this book.

Compelling story delivered through the eyes of a brilliant, neurodivergent 10 year old. Funny, raw, poignant.

Political backdrop doesn’t smack you but is so well integrated that its’ power stuns. Perfect narration!

Unprepared for where the story went

It took me a long time to get truly involved with the story, but by the end I was crying in spite of myself. Very timely book, too. Highly recommend.

Fantastic storytelling from child’s POV. the Narrator is exceptional. One of the best I have ever heard in audible

This book speaks to so many issues today and also timeless issues. The narrator does an incredible job of capturing young and old American and Korean and Russian voices.

Utterly moving (in a non-ironic way)

This is a novel for the moment: our anxious, polarized, weirded-out country. The satire of near-future political / informational reality is just provocative enough not to steal the show from 10-year-old Vera. Vera is always plumbing the meaning of vocabulary words in what some would label a precocious and others a neurodiverse way, She encounters something she learns to call “moving” toward the end of the book—and if you’re not moved, you may not be human. Then again, one of Vera’s two best friends is not human either. A brilliantly executed novel, very well delivered by the narrator.