Our Country Friends

***New York Times bestseller, shortlisted for 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction!***





'It's a true pleasure to sink into Shteyngart's expansive, benevolent storytelling' Sunday Times

'A masterpiece . . . There cannot be a more relevant novel for our moment, certainly not one with such beauty of description, depth of feeling, and, as always, humour.'-Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofLess



It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. 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.



Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His novel Super Sad True Love Story won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and became one of the most iconic novels of the decade. His memoir, Little Failure, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a New York Times bestseller.His most recent novel is Lake Success. His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.



Our Country Friends is 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. I hope the extraterrestrials who exhume it will agree.



Reflective, earthy, humane [...] The novel's strengths abound. It upends clichés, pieties and commonplaces while also noticing salient details of the lockdown.



A warm, empathetic novel, written with a tenderness and close observation of [its] enclosed society that pulls the reader into the novel's present and allows her to forget for a little while - as Shteyngart's cast is attempting to do - the catastrophe unfolding in the world beyond.



a playful, allusive comedy of pandemic manners that triumphantly blends hilarity with soulfulness



Very Russian - in the best possible way



flamboyant, theatrical, tragicomic



Shteyngart's ability is mesmerising, almost to the point of distraction. [...] His grasp of both the minutiae and the meta of contemporary American experience reminds me of Jonathan Franzen. [...] Shteyngart brings vividly to life a group of characters who go through real, significant change, and who experience Troo Emotions (read the book to get that allusion). In fact, just read the book - no trailer necessary.



You can retreat from global catastrophe but your private calamities will come and find you. Gary Shteyngart's most moving novel, Chekhov and Boccaccio reimagined in America in the year of the pandemic, is a powerful fable of our broken time.



It's both tender and hilarious (frequently at once), and it's attentive to the jittery cultural and political moment in



which it's set. [...] Shteyngart has a Nabokovian ability to enrich narrative with metaphor like some ingenious literary nutritionist . . .



Gary Shteyngart is a national treasure. He has always written with great humor and heart, but never more so than here. Be careful reading this book in public;it is as likely to make you laugh out loud as cry.



There cannot be a more relevant novel for our moment, certainly not one with such beauty of description, depth of feeling, and, as always, humor. Shteyngart has written an American comic Decameron, or, to be plain: a masterpiece.



Shteyngart's big-hearted drama is timely yet timeless with its penetrating and nuanced social commentary exploring identity, racism, celebrity culture, social media, and humanity. Above all, Shteyngart artfully exemplifies love in its many registers-parental, brotherly, romantic-in what is ultimately a 'super sad true love' story.



The Great American Pandemic Novel only Shteyngart could write, full of hyphenated identities, killer prose, and wild vitality.



One of the first - and best - lockdown novels



It's the perfect conceit for a story: ill-matched folk crammed together with no means of escape, where the only options are to talk, fight or do what else comes naturally.