Crossroads

‘His best novel yet … A Middlemarch-like triumph’ Telegraph

‘A pleasure bomb of a novel’ Vogue

‘A true modern master’ Independent

It’s 23 December 1971, and the Hildebrandts are at a crossroads. Fifteen-year-old Perry has resolved to be a better person and quit dealing drugs to seventh graders. His sister Becky, the once straight-laced high school social queen, has veered into counterculture, while at college, Clem is wrestling with a decision that might tear his family apart. As their parents – Russ, a suburban pastor, and Marion, his restless wife – tug against the bonds of a joyless marriage, Crossroads finds a family, and a nation, struggling to do the right thing.

‘Funny, moving, crackling with life, it has what all great fiction should have’ Financial Times

‘Intoxicating – a luxuriant domestic drama’ Guardian

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GUARDIAN BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2021 • AN INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR • A WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR • A LIT HUB BOOK OF THE YEAR

Reviews

‘[Franzen’s] talents as a comic storyteller are such that his capacious tales are a treat to get lost in. This one is no exception … This is a novel whose momentum often derives from the altered states of its characters — obsession; intoxication; lust; religious fervour; mania — and the humour is usually of the painful variety as their lives uniformly crumble and they agonise over how — or indeed whether — to be good’ Daily Mail

‘[A] pleasure bomb of a novel … Few [writers] can take human contradiction and make it half as entertaining and intimate as Franzen does … A magnificent portrait of an American family on the brink’ Vogue

‘In Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen goes back to family-anatomising basics – and it's his best novel yet … The result is a Middlemarch-like triumph’ Telegraph

‘Franzen has laid the ground beautifully, and his first act is intoxicating – a luxuriant domestic drama that opens out into politics, running against the grain of the counterculture with its focus on the friction between conservatism and radicalism, Christianity and social activism’ Guardian

‘Crossroads is classic Franzen fodder: a slice of suburban life ripe not for satire but for the far deadlier scrutiny that comes from taking it seriously’ New Yorker

‘A mellow, marzipan-hued ’70s-era heartbreaker. Crossroads is warmer than anything [Franzen has] yet written, wider in its human sympathies, weightier of image and intellect’ New York Times Book Review

‘The compelling dialogue, the authenticity of place, time and character, the assured insights and the exquisite minutiae of description, all confirm that the reader is in the hands of a true modern master … a simply stunning novel’ iNews

‘A firecracker’ Irish Times

‘A mesmerising tale … he writes sentences that are as addictive as opioids’ Herald

About the author

Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Purity, and six works of nonfiction, most recentlyWhat If We Stopped Pretending? and The End of the End of the Earth. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.