Our Country Friends

A powerful, emotionally rich novel about a group of friends sheltering in place at a country house during the first months of the pandemic-a book written in real time by the bestselling author of Lake Success and Super Sad True Love Story.

It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next few months new bonds of friendship and love will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge among this unlikely cast of characters, each richly drawn and achingly human: 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 young flame-thrower of an essayist, originally from the Carolinas; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.

In a remarkable literary feat, Gary Shteyngart has documented through fiction the emotional toll of our recent times: a story of love and friendship that reads like a great Russian novel set in upstate New York, 2020. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by a novelist Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times calls "one of his generation's most original and exhilarating writers."