
Crossroads
Audible Audiobook
– Unabridged
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The instant New York Times best seller
A Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2021
An Independent Book of the Year
A White Review Book of the Year
A Lit Hub Best Book of the Year
Set in a historical moment of moral crisis, Crossroads is the stunning foundation of a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigate the political and social crosscurrents of the past 50 years.
A White Review Book of the Year
A Lit Hub Best Book of the Year
It’s 23rd December 1971, and heavy weather is the forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother, Perry, who’s been selling drugs to seventh-graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.
Jonathan Franzen’s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and their keen-eyed take on the complexities of contemporary America. Now, for the first time, in Crossroads, Franzen explores the history of a generation. With characteristic humour and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that feels no less immediate.
A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a historical moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen’s gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.
- Listening Length24 hours and 22 minutes
- Audible release date5 October 2021
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB09B7SLTL3
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
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Product details
Listening Length | 24 hours and 22 minutes |
---|---|
Author | Jonathan Franzen |
Narrator | David Pittu |
Whispersync for Voice | Ready |
Audible.com.au Release Date | 05 October 2021 |
Publisher | Fourth Estate |
Program Type | Audiobook |
Version | Unabridged |
Language | English |
ASIN | B09B7SLTL3 |
Best Sellers Rank | 1,067 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) 34 in Family Life Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) 47 in Literary Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) 186 in Family Life Fiction (Books) |
Customer reviews
Top reviews from Australia
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Chapter by chapter, the story of family developments is carried forward by concentrating on one character at a time. Franzen builds a complex, layered view of each psyche and how much each person knows and understands the others which frankly, is gob-smacking in its brilliance. Our sympathies wax and wane for each of them as the annual Crossroads trip to help out in Navaho country approaches and Russ does all he can to seal his fate with Frances. Once there, there’s a disaster that has far reaching consequences and by the end of the novel you wonder what’s in store for this fractured family. Luckily, this is the first of a trilogy. This would be an excellent novel for a non-Christian to read to understand how Christianity has formed the culture of the US. It’s very worthy, except when it’s not. This is one of those books that make you dubious about picking up the next book on your pile (or tablet) because no doubt, the next book will not be as good.
Top reviews from other countries



Fiction is as much about what a writer leaves out as what he puts in. What is left out is filled in by the reader's imagination and empathy with the characters. That is the magic of fiction.
Franzen leaves out nothing about his characters. He describes every emotion, every thought about that emotion, every emotion about the thoughts about that emotion, every thought about the emotion about the thoughts about that emotion - ad infinitum.
In a novel with a thin plot driven by characters we end up curiously uninvolved with those characters. This is because by describing the characters in every detail, Franzen leaves the reader no room to project into them, to provide for them the elements that the author may only suggest or briefly describe. In his endless dissection of the minds of very ordinary characters Franzen destroys the magic of fiction.


Franzen writes people really well, all different kinds and he sinks you into the mind set of each of his characters, their frailties, their personality with great skill.
Excellent