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.”
About the author
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and moved 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 previous novel, Our Country Friends, was also a New York Times bestseller. His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries. He has worked on several television shows, including HBO’s Succession and The Regime. He lives in New York with his wife and son.
“Genius . . . [a] miracle.”
The Washington Post
A note from the author
Hello, British Jews! It’s been a while since we’ve met in London and I miss you. My latest novel, Vera, or Faith is the work of a SAP, or Soviet Ashkenazi Pessimist. So what makes the work overwhelmingly Jewish is the dystopian portrait of America in the near future seen through the eyes of a SAP writer. Are things tragic? Of course, they are. In this book, things in America have gotten even worse than at present, if you can imagine it. But to lean on the Jewishness some more, the dismal events of the book are pretty funny, too. Our heroine is the ten-year-old Vera Shmulkin-Bradford, who, as the name suggests, has a (Soviet) Jewish father and a WASP-y mother. To make things even more confusing, her birth mother was Korean-American. All this is very Jewish, in a New York sense.
To make things even more Jewish, the story also involves her grandparents, who are Soviet Jews. I’ve worked this terrain for most of my career, but this is the first time I think I’ve really put together three generations of Soviet and post-Soviet Jews in this manner. It’s really fun to see everyone in action. And this book, which pre-supposes an American constitutional amendment known as Five-Three, which essentially grants an “enhanced” vote to “exceptional Americans,” meaning the whitest and most Christian, raises questions of belonging that have been a Jewish subject since the beginning of time. (Spoiler alert: poor Vera is not going to qualify for “exceptionalism”). The story is also a bit of an adventure as Vera travels far and wide to find her birth mother and to figure out what her mosaic of a family really means and how to make her first friend. I think it’s my most heartfelt work but, to use Jewish idioms, not too schmaltzy. Just the right of level of schmaltz, I hope. L’chaim!
Read the opening pages of Vera, or Faith
“Very funny, very sad, very sharp, and completely delightful.”
Elif Batuman
“Pull up a beach chair: The book of the summer is here. . . . A poignant Harriet the Spy–esque delight.”
People (Book of the Week)
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