Vera, or Faith cover art

Vera, or Faith

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The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love each other 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 21st 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 give 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: 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.

©2025 Gary Shteyngart (P)2025 Random House Audio Coming of Age Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Boston Russia
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This book is all about searching for identity. I loved taking the perspective of a child it gives the story such a great innocence to her understand of the world.

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I purchased Vera upon a Guardian-review. Never a better spent credit! It is the best book I’ve read since… since very long. Shteyngart knows everything about an extra smart and extremely lonely little girl’s world and shows it with an amazing vocabulary, well-paced plot, wit and a big heart. A love story between mother and daughter in a not too far distopian Boston, this novel is getting better chapter by chapter until the surprising, amazing, heartwarming end without being cheesy at any moment. The narrator was simply amazing!

Now imagine my astonishment when I bump into the topic of capital treason int he middle of the book. I live in Budapest, Hungary and you know well, that our prime minister has sold my country (and my people) by the pound to Russia. I must admit that Shteyngart’s definition is correct: Budapest is the capital of Commonwealth of Illiberal States. Tragic but true… for the time being.

Outstanding, hilarious, heartbreaking, clever

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