#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.
"So funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent" (The Chicago Tribune), the New York Times bestseller Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder, a daring and penetrating book from "the most intelligent novelist of [his] generation" (The New Republic), Jonathan Franzen, the author of Crossroads
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with the Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world--including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and she is equally conflicted about her attraction to him.
The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters, and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes.