Winner of the Galaxy International Author of the Year 2010.
October 2010 Mega Book of the Month.
Selected as the Oprah's Book Club pick.
The long awaited new novel from Jonathan Franzen is a masterpiece, being heralded as the return of the Great American Novel and so it should be. The story revolves around the close relationships of a family living in modern day America with many popular culture references illustrating how we relate to each other nowadays and how the choices we make each day affect us and those around us. A perceptive and exceptional read.
An international bestseller and the novel of the year, 'Freedom' is an epic of contemporary love and marriage.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 an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, 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 old college friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to poor 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 too much 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.
