NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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 “Pull up a beach chair: The book of the summer is here. . . . A poignant Harriet the
Spy –esque delight.”— People (Book of the Week) “Genius . . . [a] miracle.”— The Washington
Post “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
must-read.” —The Los Angeles Times “Shteyngart is one of the best comedians in literature
today.”— BookPage (starred review) A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: The New York Times Time The
Washington Post The Boston Globe Bustle Vulture Town & Country Minneapolis Star Tribune
Book Riot Publishers Weekly Literary Hub AV Club Hey Alma 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."
