Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

An international bestseller and the novel of the year, ‘Freedom’ is an epic of contemporary love and marriage.

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul – the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter – environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, family man – she was doing her small part to build a better world.

But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz – outré rocker and Walter's old college friend and rival – still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to poor Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become ‘a very different kind of neighbour’, an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?

In his first novel since ‘The Corrections’, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. ‘Freedom’ comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of too much liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's intensely realized characters, as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

From Publisher

Jonathan Franzen was born in 1959 and is the author of three novels – The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), Strong Motion (1992), The Corrections (2001) – a collection of essays, How to Be Alone (2002), a memoir, The Discomfort Zone (2006) and a translation of Spring Awakening, a play by Frank Wedekind (2007). His honours include a Whiting Writers Award in 1988, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, the American Academy's Berlin Prize in 2000, and the National Book Award (for The Corrections) in 2001. He writes frequently for the New Yorker, and lives in New York City.

In his astutely written chronicle of life in America at the beginning of the 21st century - as told through the story of the disintegrating marriage of one mid-western couple - Franzen dramatizes the central conflict of his time and place: in a world of moral relativism, extravagant entitlements, and fluid notions of good and evil, how best to use our personal freedom?

A masterpiece of American fiction - an engrossing and illuminating work that is also a page-turner.

Freedom is a wise novel on suburban life and its hidden tragedies and neuroses.

Franzen gives an epic of contemporary love and marriage, and an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age...

Epic and thought-provoking social commentary on contemporary American life.

A convincing epic of contemporary American middle-class struggles. The literary benchmark of the year.

A portrait of the American middle class during the last days of the 20th century and fist part of the 21st century, examines how the dreams and choices of youth turn into the disappointments and compromises of middle-age.