Freedom - by Jonathan Franzen (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - Winner of the John Gardner Fiction Award - A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist - A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

Freedom, by New York Times-bestselling author Jonathan Franzen, the author of Crossroads, is a masterly novel of contemporary love and marriage, a brilliant charting of the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, and the heavy weight of empire.

Patty and Walter Berglund were the pioneers of old St. Paul--the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant garde of the Whole Foods generation. But now, in the new millennium, they have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter, once an environmental lawyer, taken a job working with Big Coal? Most startling of all, why has Patty, the perfect neighbor, turned into the local Fury?

Patty and Walter Berglund are indelible characters, and their mistakes and joys, as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, have become touchstones of contemporary American reality.

Review Quotes

"A masterpiece of American fiction." --The New York Times Book Review

"Mr. Franzen has written his most deeply felt novel yet--a novel that turns out to be both a compelling biography of a dysfunctional family and an indelible portrait of our times." --The New York Times

"A work of total genius." --New York Magazine

"The Great American Novel." --Esquire

"One of the best living American novelists." --Time

"Epic." --Vanity Fair

"Hugely ambitious . . . Freedom is very, very good." --USA Today

"Brilliant . . . Epic . . . An extraordinary stylist." --The Washington Post

"A surprisingly moving and even hopeful epic." --NPR

"Sweeping and powerful." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Consuming and extraordinarily moving." --Los Angeles Times

"Immense and unforgettable." --Chicago Tribune

"Devastatingly insightful." --The Miami Herald

"A page turner that engages the mind." --Newsday

"It's refreshing to see a novelist who wants to engage the questions of our time in the tradition of 20th-century greats like John Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis . . . [This] is a book you'll still be thinking about long after you've finished reading it." --Associated Press

"Deeply moving and superbly crafted . . . It's such a full novel, rich in description, broad in its reach and full of wry observations." --Pittsburg Post-Gazette

"His writing is so gorgeous . . . Franzen is one of those exceptional writers whose works define an era and a generation, and his books demand to be read." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A tour de force . . . one of the finest novelists of his generation." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A highly readable triumph of conventional realism . . . Addictive." --The National

"The first Great American Novel of the post-Obama era." --Telegraph (UK)

"A literary genius . . . This is simply on a different plane from other contemporary fiction . . . Freedom is the novel of the year, and the century." --The Guardian (UK)

"A triumph . . . A pleasure to read." --The New York Observer

"Exhilarating . . . Gripping . . . Moving . . . On a level with The Great Gatsby [and] Gone With the Wind." --Bloomberg

About the Author