Vera, or Faith: A Novel

by Gary Shteyngart Narrated by Shannon Tyo, Gary Shteyngart

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

This modern family is coming apart at the seams — and one child is at the center of it all. Funny, warm and big-hearted, you'll want to read this in one sitting.

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."

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

The abiding miracle of Shteyngart’s work is that it seems just as timely as a Shouts & Murmurs gag in this week’s New Yorker while staying fixed to the timeless absurdity of human life. That dexterity speaks to the range of his sympathy and the depth of his attention.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“A sardonic tragicomedy about an anxiety-ridden little girl on a quest to uncover where she really came from.”—Time

“Stellar.”—Los Angeles Times

“A hilarious book.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“With echoes of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, Shteyngart returns with a poignant and biting novel told through the eyes of a precocious child, Vera.”—The Boston Globe

“Shteyngart’s novels are never to be missed, and this one is a timely, emotional look at what our country is on the verge of becoming.”—Town & Country

“This is my favorite Gary Shteyngart novel ever.”—Newsday

“Gary Shteyngart has done it again. . . . 10-year-old narrator Vera Bradford-Shmulkin is so brilliant, funny, and relatably anxious that, through her, we might become receptive to new and necessary understandings of dystopia.”—Bustle

“A brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country . . . essential and lifesaving.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Shteyngart is one of the best comedians in literature today, and like all the great ones, his humor elucidates as much as it amuses. brilliant.”—BookPage, starred review

“Combining deep humanity with Gary Shteyngart’s customary intelligence and wit, Vera, or Faith is a reminder of why he’s a writer whose works are good ones to keep close at hand in challenging times.”—Shelf Awareness

“The clever satire, sociopolitical skewering, and nimble wordplay are quintessential Shteyngart. This is another winner from a distinctive voice.”—Booklist 

“Shteyngart’s work is always saturated with humor and heart, and his latest novel offers a new perspective on one of literature’s most prominent subjects: How can a family survive in America?”—Vulture

“an unnerving—and very funny—portrait of America in the near future and an indelible portrait of its ten-year-old heroine, and attests to Shteyngart’s magic ability to write in multiple emotional octaves and his gift for both sharp-edged humor and heartfelt tenderness.”—Michiko Kakutani, author of The Great Wave

“In its swirls of emotion, its humor, its pathos, and the unsparing humanity of its vision, Vera, or Faith is like some fabulous, hitherto-unknown creature that’s been let out of its bottle and set free. It begins to seem that there’s nothing Gary Shteyngart can’t do.”—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Day and The Hours

“Vera, or Faith is very funny, very sad, very sharp, and completely delightful—peak Shteyngart!”—Elif Batuman, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Idiot

“A novel that you can read in one sitting that will stay with you forever . . . Vera instantly became one of my favorite child narrators, and her lucid bewilderment is by turns poignant, funny, and wise.”—Karen Russell, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Swamplandia!

“Irresistible . . . I loved it.”—Ed Park, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Same Bed Different Dreams

“Shteyngart has outdone himself with the charming, hilarious, and deeply moving Vera, or Faith. She’s easily one of my favorite characters in fiction, and this is now one of my favorite novels.”—Angie Kim, New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls

“A beautiful, extraordinary, completely brilliant book that is so humane it makes me feel more human.”—Joe Weisberg, creator of The Americans

“Shteyngart’s reliable prescience and pessimistic wit are on full display in this affecting drama of a slightly more unsettling world than ours.”—Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2025-04-19
A brilliant fable about childhood, and so much more, in our broken country.

“It was said by both her pediatrician and her psychologist that Vera, while presenting as a very bright ten-year-old, suffered from intense anxiety.” Vera Bradford-Shmulkin really does have a lot on her plate for a kid. Among the 23 chapter titles in this slim and explosively lovely novel: “She had to hold the family together.” “She had to survive recess.” “She had to expand herThings I Still Need to Know Diary.” “She had to figure out if Daddy was a traitor.” “She had to fall asleep.” The novel is set in a delicately constructed near future, with self-driving cars and smart chessboards and a proposed constitutional amendment that will give an “‘enhanced vote’…counting for five-thirds of a regular vote to so-called ‘exceptional Americans,’ those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolution­ary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.” These are the words of Vera’s teacher, who is dividing the class into teams to debate the topic. She makes half-Korean, half-Russian Vera the lead for the pro-Five-Three side, while the opposition will be led by an "exceptional American" type her parents call Moncler Stephen because of his jacket. Winning this debate is another thing Vera has to do, along with getting up the nerve to deliver “Ten Great Things About Daddy and Why You Should Stay Together with Him,” and its counterpart, “Six Great Things About Mom” to the parents in question, who fight constantly. This mom is the one she calls “Anne mom,” her WASP stepmother Anne Bradford; “Mom Mom,” her Korean biological mother, has long been out of the picture and she has never known why. (“She had to find out the truth about Mom Mom.”) This book is about so many things: the drama of the gifted child, nativism and immigrant culture (“She had to visit Baba Tanya and Grandpa Boris in the suburbs”), technology and oppression, the role of intellectuals, the way we learn language. As the political situation in the United States evolves, Shteyngart’s particular flavor of black humor—Russian wry?—reconnects with its roots in sorrow and resistance and becomes essential and lifesaving.

Shteyngart is doing his most important work ever, illuminating the current tragedy with humor, smarts, and heart.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193442578
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	07/08/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Part One

The First Day

1.

She Had to Hold the Family Together

School started and it was awful. “Predictably awful,” as Anne Mom would say. “A self-fulfilling prophecy,” she might add of Vera’s disdain for school. Anne Mom was always predicting things in the near future. “I’m the Nostradamus of two weeks from now,” she told Vera over and over again and Vera knew the correct social response was to laugh because Anne Mom was trying to be as witty as Daddy, though when Vera became a teenager in three years she could roll her eyes, because she had seen it done on television and sometimes on the devices Anne Mom didn’t allow her.

She added “Nostradamus” to her Things I Still Need to Know Diary.

The hallways of the school were a faded red and pink and orange and there were motivational posters and funny sayings from the Peanuts gang and dusty green floors and mesh over the windows looking onto the rump of another sad uptown building. Daddy compared the color scheme to an “ice-cream shop in hell” and Anne Mom had yelled at him not to use that language (“You know she’s going to imitate you, she worships you!”) or to talk the school down. The school was a point of pride for Daddy because you had to take a test when you were only four years old to get in, and you needed to score “in the ninety-ninth percentile,” although Vera had overheard that Dylan had been admitted because they wanted to keep siblings together and she thought this contrast between their intelligence to be “exquisite” and “delectable,” two words Anne Mom wanted her to drop if she were to make any friends at her school.

“Both my kids go to a public school,” Daddy had once declared on television with what Anne Mom called a “raffish” smile while some other men in suits and ties were yelling at him about his “politics,” although he had failed to mention that it was a school for superbright kids, and that made her sad. There were a lot of “statuses” in the world and each year she was becoming aware of more of them. For example, it also made her sad when Daddy sat apart from them on planes because he always had a ticket in “Business Class” and just this summer when they had flown to Korea and Japan, where Daddy had to deliver some speeches, she had asked him “Why can’t you fly with us in Family Class?” and he said “Awwww, poor Doxie” (despite being short, she was shaped lean and tubular like a dachshund), then bent down and grizzled her forehead with his stubble and it hurt the whole ride back and she didn’t see “a lick” (Anne Mom phrasing) of him for fourteen hours straight—not that she saw that much of him at home.

So, yes, school was predictably awful and a lot of it was dumb. Vera looked through the mesh on the windows at the Black people across the block who patronized a fish store. Sometimes they would look back at her and sometimes they would smile, maybe remembering how boring fifth grade had been. There was a lot of “advanced” work, but Vera breezed through it; mostly it was ordering things in rows and columns and sometimes demonstrating “comprehension.” This year, because of the conventions, there was going to be a whole module on the Constitution and just how it might be amended.

All the students sat dutifully in their red checkered uniforms (the girls had to wear bow ties and skirts, the boys sweaters and ties) and raised their hands whether they knew an answer or not because participation was forty percent of their grade. There was only one troublemaker in the class, Stephen, one of the Moncler Twins (Anne Mom had named them thus because of the expensive winter jackets they wore), and he probably thought he could get away with it because he was Five-Three, same as Dylan and Anne Mom, and both of the twins’ parents were “super white” and could trace their heritage to the Revolutionary War. At least half the kids in her school were Asian or half Asian like Vera was, at least genetically because of her mom mom, who had been Daddy’s girlfriend before he met Anne Mom. Mom Mom had abandoned her and Daddy, maybe because she didn’t love Vera on account of that she had been a “tough baby” who couldn’t go to sleep unless you drove her around the block in a car, and back then Daddy could barely afford the gas.

It was said by both her pediatrician and her psychologist that Vera, while presenting as a very bright ten-year-old, suffered from intense anxiety, in the same way the rest of her family did except for Dylan, whose blond curls were constantly in motion as he made short work of the school’s jungle gym and wrestled on the hot tarmac with his little buddies. School made her anxious, especially because of what Anne Mom called the “social component,” but she had been worried the entire summer as well.

Her parents fought every day on a variety of subjects, but especially about how she and Dylan were to be raised. Anne Mom wanted a lot of structure, but Daddy said childhood “should just happen,” like it had happened to him, and that until you went to grad school “nothing really mattered,” it was all just a “neoliberal frog-march of the damned.” (Daddy supplied a lot of the words for her Things I Still Need to Know Diary.) Once, she even overheard him crying in “Daddy’s Little Pool” as she used to call the hot tub at their summer house when she was much younger and more innocent, and she begged Anne Mom to please not fight with him anymore that day. But Anne Mom told her Daddy was crying because someone important—the “Rhodesian Billionaire” who wanted to buy his magazine and thus make them “more comfortable”—had been especially mean to him on social media and that he felt bullied. “If he’s being bullied he should talk to someone,” Vera told Anne Mom, but Daddy kept crying softly like one of the wounded wild animals in the forest behind the hot tub and nothing could be done about it until dinner and time for his first glass of what she used to call “Daddy’s special juice” or “Daddy’s mar-tiny.”

She tried to “dialogue” with Dylan about their family situation, but he would just go on playing with his robot dinos on the porch while their summer house shuddered with their parents’ elegant and vicious turns of phrase. “Don’t you care if they get divorced?” she would whisper to Dylan, even though no one was in earshot, because the words felt so sad and shameful to her. Her love for Anne Mom was measured, but to have two moms leave her (surely, she would take Dylan with her in the split) would mean she was beyond loving, beyond Family Class. “I dunn ah”—Dylan would shrug and then punch her in the elbow where it hurt the most. “Fine, but don’t come to me when we’re homeless,” Vera told him.

Becoming homeless worried Vera. She read the billboards at the bus shelters very earnestly. One told her that sixty-three percent of the occupants of homeless shelters in the city were members of families, probably failed families like her own would become if she were unable to hold her parents together, or if her daddy didn’t manage to sell the troubled magazine he edited to the Rhodesian Billionaire who would make them comfortable and unafraid. She had once quizzed her dad on the subject of their finances, and he had said, “Well, we’re not poor, but we’re not super rich like half the jerks in this city.”

“Then what are we exactly?” Vera had asked. She liked to be exact.

“We’re what’s called merely rich,” Daddy explained, “but our position is very precarious especially with how much I’ve staked on this goddamn magazine. We could lose everything, and your mother’s trust just pays for the incidentals. Unless we moved to a small metro in the sticks. And then I’d like to see your mom eat a plate of General Tso’s chicken or whatever.”

So, it was true, she thought. They were all going to end up in a homeless shelter. Especially if Daddy’s magazine remained unsold “and/or” Daddy and Anne Mom got divorced.

“Ergo,” another diary word, she had to hold them together.

Ergo, the Lists.

Videos