Crossroads

[Franzens] 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

Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Purity, and six works of nonfiction, most recentlyWhat If We Stopped Pretending? and The End of the End of the Earth. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.