Our Country Friends
Jan 2022 · Atlantic Books
2,3star
3 reviewsreport
eBook
336
Pages
family_home
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About this eBook
*** New York Times bestseller, shortlisted for 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction !***
'It's a true pleasure to sink into Shteyngart's expansive, benevolent storytelling' Sunday Times
'A masterpiece . . . There cannot be a more relevant novel for our moment, certainly not one with such beauty of description, depth of feeling, and, as always, humour.'-Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
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 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.
'It's a true pleasure to sink into Shteyngart's expansive, benevolent storytelling' Sunday Times
'A masterpiece . . . There cannot be a more relevant novel for our moment, certainly not one with such beauty of description, depth of feeling, and, as always, humour.'-Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
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 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.
Ratings and reviews
2,3
3 reviews
Rachel B
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28 January 2022
Unfortunately this book just wasn't for me. Plenty of people have given it great reviews so it may suit others but I didn't really get it and found it quite dire. Our Country Friends is set during the early days of the Covid 19 pandemic, and progresses to cover a large period of 2020. During it, author and landowner Senderkovsky invites some of his friends to stay on his land where he has a number of bungalows they can use. However, that is pretty much all that happens. We follow a handful of conversations the visitors have and whilst the book was already fairly short I found it could have been cut to about a quarter of the length and still be long enough to cover everything that happens. I wanted to give up on the book but battled through so that I could give it a fair review. Overall, I didn't really feel like I understood what was going on most of the time as it just rambled and switched between characters with no obvious flow. I also wasn't sure whether the current plot point was actually happen or in the character's head. Overall, I felt like nothing happened in this book and it was just a long ramble, but I think I just didn't get it and it could suit other readers better.
Jayne B
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18 January 2022
I had high expectations of this book. It centred around a group of friends sitting out the pandemic in the country. Senderovsky lived with his wife and daughter on a sprawling estate with several bungalows for his friends to live in safely and socially distanced. It started well but didn’t really go anywhere. Each of the friends had different reasons for staying but these were never fully developed. As each person was focussed on although there was little to like about them, their characters were fairly one dimensional. There were affairs which were shrugged off without any reasoning behind them. The handyman was mentioned frequently but had no real part in the book. I got that it was a struggle during lockdown but felt this book didn’t really explore the issues fully. I finished the book but found the last few chapters strange. It almost felt as though there was so much more to say about Sendorovsky, Karen and Vinod in particular but it didn’t get said. Karen and Vinod were the most likeable characters of an odd bunch. I would have preferred a book with less characters and more substance to them.
Catherine Foster
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17 August 2022
Really enjoyed most of it but the last 20% or so really dragged once the dream descriptions started.
About the author
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His novel Super Sad True Love Story won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and became one of the most iconic novels of the decade. His memoir, Little Failure, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a New York Times bestseller. His most recent novel is Lake Success. His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.
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