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.”