Our Country Friends - Gary Shteyngart

Written by Gary Shteyngart
Read by Rob Shapiro
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Books on Tape
Release date: November 2, 2021
Duration: 12:22:00

Eight friends, one country house, and six months in isolation—a novel about love, friendship, family, and betrayal hailed as a “virtuoso performance” (USA Today) and “an homage to Chekhov with four romances and a finale that will break your heart” (The Washington Post)

In the rolling hills of upstate New York, 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.

“Rob Shapiro deftly narrates this Chekhovian study of Sasha, a Russian-American writer; his Russian-American wife, Masha, a psychiatrist; and their precocious 8-year-old adopted daughter, Natasha. The couple invites two longtime friends to shelter in place at their upstate New York country estate in the early days of the Covid pandemic. The guests are Karen, a Korean-American app developer and Vinood, an Indian-American aspiring writer, as well as Karen’s cousin, Ed; Sasha’s former student, Dee, a Southern essayist; and a famous actor. Shapiro subtly shapes each character’s voice as he illuminates their day-to-day activities and concerns. While this novel contains many elements of a comedy of manners, its impact is elevated by skillful presentations of the challenges facing first-generation Americans, as well as the bond that develops between the childless Karen and Natasha.”— AudioFile