Freedom - Hardcover

Franzen, Jonathan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1554688833 ISBN 13: 9781554688838

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010

Synopsis

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 the ideal sort of neighbour who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter -- environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total 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 college best friend and rival -- still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to 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 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.

About this title

About the Author

JONATHAN FRANZEN is the author of four novels, The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction, and Freedom; a collection of non-fiction, How to Be Alone; and The Discomfort Zone, a memoir. He has been named one of the Granta 20 Best Novelists Under 40 and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and Harper’s. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1554688833
• ISBN 13: 9781554688838
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576