Vera, or Faith - Large Print by Gary Shteyngart (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A poignant, sharp-eyed, 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

"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 Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2025

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."

Review Quotes

"Gary Shteyngart's deeply moving new novel is the story of one American family's efforts to defy the centrifugal forces pulling them apart. The novel gives us an unnerving--and very funny--portrait of America in the near future and an indelible portrait of its ten-year-old heroine, and attests to Shteyngart's magic ability to write in multiple emotional octaves and his gift for both sharp-edged humor and heartfelt tenderness."--Michiko Kakutani, author of The Great Wave

"In its swirls of emotion, its humor, its pathos, and 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."--Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Day and The Hours

"A brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country . . . Shteyngart's particular flavor of black humor--Russian wry?--reconnects with its roots in sorrow and resistance and becomes essential and lifesaving. Shteyngart is doing his most important work ever, illuminating the current tragedy with humor, smarts, and heart."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Vera, or Faith is very funny, very sad, very sharp, and completely delightful--peak Shteyngart!"--Elif Batuman, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Idiot

"A novel that you can read in one sitting that will stay with you forever . . . Vera instantly became one of my favorite child narrators, and her lucid bewilderment is by turns poignant, funny, and wise."--Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Swamplandia!

"Irresistible . . . I loved it." --Ed Park, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Same Bed Different Dreams

"Shteyngart's new novel, his first since 2021's Our Country Friends, is the story of a very volatile family in a very volatile America, filtered through the eyes of a child, who just wants to be loved (the most Shteyngartian of motivations, and the most human)."--Literary Hub, one of the "Most Anticipated Books of 2025"

"Shteyngart has outdone himself with the charming, hilarious, and deeply moving Vera, or Faith. Vera will make you laugh, break your heart, and fill you with hope, all at the same time. She's easily one of my favorite characters in fiction, and this is now one of my favorite novels." --Angie Kim, New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls

"A beautiful, extraordinary, completely brilliant book that is so humane it makes me feel more human."--Joe Weisberg, creator of The Americans

"Shteyngart's reliable prescience and pessimistic wit are on full display in this affecting drama of a slightly more unsettling world than ours, one where a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution would give a five-thirds vote to citizens whose roots go back to the colonial era. Readers will go all in for this story's singular heroine."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

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. His most recent novel is the New York Times bestseller Our Country Friends. His books have been published in thirty countries. He lives in New York with his wife and son.