Random House Publishes ‘Our Country Friends’ by Professor Gary Shteyngart

By
Rebecca Pinwei Tseng
November 05, 2021

Our Country Friends by Associate Professor Gary Shteyngart was released by Random House on November 2, 2021. The book is available for purchase here.

The novel, set in March of 2020, follows a group of eight friends who settle in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Taking place across six months, the group undergoes new friendships and romances while old betrayals emerge. The 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.” As the months unfold, the characters each must reckon with what in life matters the most.

Our Country Friends came out to critical acclaim, earning starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus Reviews. According to Booklist, “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."

book cover

Author Salman Rushdie also praised Our Country Friends as a “powerful fable of our broken time.” Molly Young, on behalf of The New York Times, wrote that Our Country Friends is 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.”

Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972, and came to the United States seven years later. His memoir, Little Failure (Random House, 2014) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was selected as one of the best books of the year by over 45 news magazines and journals around the world. Shteyngart is also the author of Lake Success (Random House, 2018), Super Sad True Love Story (Random House, 2010), Absurdistan (Random House, 2006) and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (Riverhead, 2002). His work has been translated into 29 languages. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Esquire, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.