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Crossroads: The latest novel from the international bestselling author of The Corrections: Book 1 Paperback – 5 October 2021
Jonathan Franzen (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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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
‘His best novel yet … A Middlemarch-like triumph’ Telegraph
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 fifty years
It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is 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.
- Print length592 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publisher4th Estate GB
- Publication date5 October 2021
- Dimensions15.3 x 3.5 x 23.4 cm
- ISBN-10000830890X
- ISBN-13978-0008308902
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Product description
Review
Praise for Crossroads:
‘His 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
Book Description
The latest novel from the international bestselling author of The Corrections
About the Author
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Product details
- Publisher : 4th Estate GB (5 October 2021)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 592 pages
- ISBN-10 : 000830890X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0008308902
- Dimensions : 15.3 x 3.5 x 23.4 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 13,216 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 35 in Religious Historical Fiction (Books)
- 539 in U.S. Literature
- 1,077 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels--Purity, Freedom, The Corrections, The Twenty-Seventh City, and Strong Motion--and five works of nonfiction and translation, including Farther Away, How to Be Alone, and The Discomfort Zone, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Kunste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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