- Published: 3 September 2019
- ISBN: 9780241984086
- Imprint: Penguin General UK
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 352
- RRP: $26.00
Lake Success
- Published: 3 September 2019
- ISBN: 9780241984086
- Imprint: Penguin General UK
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 352
- RRP: $26.00
An unforgettable road trip through an America that's ominously divided, wildly diverse, and weirdly familiar. Gary Shteyngart writes with brutal honesty, virtuoso wit, and stubborn compassion for his deeply flawed but still somehow lovable characters
Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of 'The Leftovers'
The funniest book you'll read all year. A rollicking and zinger-filled road trip [and] a poignant tale of a man trying to outrace his problems. Epic, melancholy, staggeringly beautiful
Maria Semple, author of 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette?'
A trip through the American wasteland - from the people who have too little, to the people who have too much. Incredibly smart, incredibly funny, incredibly tragic, and therefore incredibly human, this is the perfect novel for these dysfunctional times
Nathan Hill, author of 'The Nix'
Gary Shteyngart hears America perfectly; its fatuity, its poignant lament, its boisterous self-loathing. Its heartbeat. Reading him sometimes makes me want to scream - with recognition and with pure hilarity
Richard Ford
A novel reflecting with perfect comedy and horrible tragedy exactly what America feels like right this minute. I barked with laughter, at the same time as wincing in pain. Shteyngart has held up a mirror to American culture that is so accurate and so devastating... Stupendous
Elizabeth Gilbert
Shteyngart does slapstick as well as ever, but he stakes out new terrain in the expert way he develops his characters' pathos.... A stylish, big-hearted novel. Shteyngart made his name as a sharp satirist, and he'll undoubtedly widen his appeal with this effort
Publisher's Weekly
SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today. By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspirational. He captures what Philip Roth once called the 'indigenous American berserk'
NPR/Fresh Air
A novel in which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced
Washington Post
Uproariously funny, bitingly satiric, yet also warm and big-hearted
Boston Globe
Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. The wit and the immigrant's sense of heartbreak just seem to pour from him
The New York Times
Lake Success is a genial and warm-hearted book...a virtuoso piece of work, full of brilliant noticings...an unhysterical novel about a hysterical country at a hysterical time - the work of a novelist who believes in the power of fiction to illuminate out shared world.
Literary Review
The satirical layering is masterful. Dark - so dark - yet delicious.
Esquire
Lake Success is undeniably enjoyable, rattling along with good jokes and sharp set pieces, and shot through with Shteyngart's good-natured melancholy.
The Times
Referencing classic novels like The Great Gatsby and On the Road, Shteyngart whips up a novel that's part-satire and part-comedy of manners, humanising the super-rich while casting a critical eye over their world. It's funny, cutting, but above all compassionate
The Herald Magazine
Shteyngart's comic energy is well deployed on the ridiculously rich, especially amid Trump's campaign and his election by, perhaps, many Greyhound riders.
Daily Mail