Our Country Friends

A Novel

By: Gary Shteyngart

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Time, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Town & Country, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews

Finalist for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction • Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize • “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.”—Molly Young, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)

Eight friends, one country house, and six months in isolation—a novel about love, friendship, family, and betrayal hailed as a “virtuoso performance” (USA Today) and “an homage to Chekhov with four romances and a finale that will break your heart” (The Washington Post)

In the rolling hills of upstate New York, 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.

Critic reviews

“The novel’s strengths abound. It upends clichés, pieties and commonplaces while also noticing salient details of the lockdown.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Our Country Friends has all [Shteyngart’s] usual humor and absurdity, but it’s deepened by a new empathy.”—Los Angeles Times

“Shteyngart knows how to make you belly laugh, and he’s in his element here, poking fun at the claustrophobia of privilege. He perfectly captures the nature of adult friendships and the petty jealousies, disappointments, and dependencies that can define them.”—Vulture

“In the backdrop of the pandemic, Gary Shteyngart gathers his memorable characters in a shelter, where they cook, seduce, and reconsider life’s meaning. . . . Like The Decameron, Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends reminds us that even in darkness, light promises to return if we reach for love and art.”—Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko, finalist for the National Book Award

“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.”—Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Here I Am

“I cannot say enough how much I loved Our Country Friends. It’s a tragicomic tour de force about so many things—sex, infatuation, the pandemic, kimchi, racism, immigration, adoption, stalking, Russian writers, K-pop, Japanese reality TV, writing—but most of all, it’s about how we create, sever, and mend lifelong bonds of friendship, how we wound and heal those we love most. It’s the rare book that, when you turn to the last page, leaves you grateful to the author for creating this world and allowing you in for a time, but also a little sad, filled with regret at having to leave it.”—Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek

“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.”—Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize–winning author of Midnight’s Children

“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.”—Booklist (starred review)

“The Great American Pandemic Novel only Shteyngart could write, full of hyphenated identities, killer prose, and wild vitality.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Tooooo loooooong

The first three acts were brilliant story telling. The act was long, tedious, and self-indulgent.

A good listen

The book is very interesting as Covid isolation surprised and affected us all in profound ways. At times the story is annoying and feels a tad contrived. Irregardless, it is definitely worth listening to. It was our book group pick and we certainly had plenty to talk about.

Unlikable characters

First part quite engaging and the writer is talented. However, the last part with the flashbacks was uninteresting and bloated. The most likable character died, leaving the rest humbled but not sure that was enough to change them. Money and property changed hands but they will continue their pretentious ways. Bummer.

Amazing performance

I’ve been a fan of Gary Shteyngart for years, but I have to say that I might have enjoyed this book mainly because of the amazing performance. The story is fine, though it leaves weird holes and leads the reader down a few blind alleys without any reason I could see, but Rob Shapiro makes each character come alive so fully that you fall in love with each of them in turn.

America in the time of covid

Immigrants, pandemic, celebrity, forever love, earth-shattering disappointment. This extraordinary novel is destined to be a snapshot in time ala Love in the Time of Cholera