Product DescriptionPRE-ORDER NOWSet 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 ?The Corrections was a masterpiece, but Crossroads is [Franzen's] finest novel yet? BookforumA Daily Mail Most Anticipated Book of 2021 ? A Guardian Most Anticipated Book of 2021 ? A Times Most Ancipated Book of 2021 ? A Glasgow Herald Most Anticipated Book of 2021 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.?Franzen is a master of rendering the broad sweep of humanity through the (extremely human) minutia of a family ? What more could a reader ask for, really?? Lit HubReviewPraise 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?It is a testament to Franzen?s authorial habits of empathy, his curiosity about the lives of others, his efforts in a land of cliche to add twists to easy assumptions, that you are likely to find yourself caring about how things turn out for each of the Hildebrandts equally? Book of the Week, Observer?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 ? What makes the book distinctly part of his canon, with its ambient atmosphere of self-absorption, self-loathing, and disaffection, is not the question of whether virtue can triumph but the meta-question that Perry asks: Does real goodness even exist, or is it always compromised by the dividends it pays to the do-gooder?? 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 ReviewBook DescriptionThe latest novel from the international bestselling author of The CorrectionsAbout the Auth