Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

A poignant, sharp-eyed, and bitterly funny tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country that’s 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 and “In its swirls of emotion, its humor and its pathos, 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. and “–Michael CunninghamThe Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love each other 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 give 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 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, and “one of his generation’s most exhilarating writers. and “