Crossroads
‘His best novel yet … A Middlemarch-like triumph’ Telegraph
‘A pleasure bomb of a novel’ Vogue
‘A true modern master’ Independent
It’s 23 December 1971, and the Hildebrandts are at a crossroads. Fifteen-year-old Perry has resolved to be a better person and quit dealing drugs to seventh graders. His sister Becky, the once straight-laced high school social queen, has veered into counterculture, while at college, Clem is wrestling with a decision that might tear his family apart. As their parents – Russ, a suburban pastor, and Marion, his restless wife – tug against the bonds of a joyless marriage, Crossroads finds a family, and a nation, struggling to do the right thing.
‘Funny, moving, crackling with life, it has what all great fiction should have’ Financial Times
‘Intoxicating – a luxuriant domestic drama’ Guardian
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A GUARDIAN BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2021 • AN INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR • A WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR • A LIT HUB BOOK OF THE YEAR
‘[Franzen’s] 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 -