Shteyngart, Gary – The Bell Bookshop

Our Country Friends

Emma — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

***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 LessIt’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.

Little Failure

Emma — Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Little Failure is Gary Shteyngart’s bestselling and very funny memoir.

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

In 1979 seven-year-old Gary Shteyngart and his parents left the Soviet Union for the consumerist paradise of America. As good Russian Jews, Gary’s parents were determined that he make something of himself. As a diminutive asthmatic with a runny nose, Gary knew his was to be a life of spectacular disappointments. He wasn’t wrong. In Little Failure he reveals how, by ending up a prize-winning novelist, he visited great shame on his family.

‘Dazzling, exquisitely charted. Time spent with Shteyngart is like being with Woody Allen on speed: razor-sharp, funny and deeply moving’ Mail on Sunday

‘A marvel of a story. His finest book yet’ Zadie Smith

‘An immigrant story, a coming-of-age story, a becoming-a-writer story. Dazzling’ Meg Wolitzer

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972. In 2007 he was named one of Granta‘s Best Young American novelists. His debut The Russian Debutante’s Handbook was widely acclaimed (and won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction), as were his second, Absurdistan (one of the 10 Best Books of the Year in the New York Times) and Super Sad True Love Story (which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize).