Our Country Friends

Novelist The New York Times calls "one of his generation's most original and exhilarating writers" has written a book about love, friendship, and betrayal that is powerful, emotionally rich, and reads like a great Russian novel or Chekhov on the Hudson. The book is about eight friends, one country house, four romances, and six months in isolation.

March 2020: a catastrophe is breaking out. To wait out the epidemic, a group of friends and friends of friends congregate in a rural home. Over the course of the following six months, each character will be forced to reassess who they love and what matters most as old betrayals surface and new friendships and romantic relationships take root. A young flame-thrower of an essayist originally from the Carolinas; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; an Indian American writer in struggle; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; an international dandy with three passports; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family are among the unlikely cast of characters.

Gary Shteyngart has accomplished a tremendous literary feat by capturing, in fiction, the emotional toll of our recent past. The story of love and friendship is set in upstate New York and reads like a classic Russian book. The author of the cherished hit, Super Sad True Love Story, has taken on a more ambitious project with Our Country Friends, which is both elegiac and extremely amusing.