Crossroads

A Novel (A Key to All Mythologies, Book 1)

By: Jonathan Franzen

Narrated by: David Pittu

Length: 24 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

New York Times Best Seller

The highly anticipated new novel from one of our greatest living writers.

It's December 23, 1971, and the Hildebrandt family is at a crossroads. The patriarch, Russ, the associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, is poised to break free of a marriage he finds joyless - unless his brilliant and unstable wife, Marion, breaks free of it first. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college afire 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 veered into the era's counterculture, while their younger brother Perry, fed up with selling pot to support his drug habit, has firmly resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.

Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories. Only now, though, in Crossroads, has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its workings, is truly at the centre.

By turns comic and harrowing, a tour-de-force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, Crossroads is the first volume of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, that will span three generations and trace the inner life of our culture through the present day. Complete in itself, set in a historical moment of moral crisis, and reaching back to the early twentieth century, Crossroads serves as a foundation for a sweeping investigation of human mythologies, as the Hildebrandt family navigates the political, intellectual and social crosscurrents of the past 50 years.

Jonathan Franzen's gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.

©2021 Jonathan Franzen (P)2021 Penguin Random House Canada

Critic reviews

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Named a most anticipated book of the season by The New York Times ● USA Today ● Oprah Daily ● TIME ● Entertainment Weekly ● Vulture ● Los Angeles Times ● San Francisco Chronicle ● Town & Country ● The Guardian ● Newsday ● The Star Tribune ● Lit Hub ● Thrillist

Named one of the best books of 2021 by Publishers Weekly • Kirkus Reviews • The New York Times Book Review • Washington Post • Financial Times • The Telegraph • NPR • TIME • Winnipeg Free Press • The Guardian • Good Housekeeping • Town & Country • Daily Mail • Slate • Oprah Daily • Amazon

"A compelling examination of faith, privilege and ambition."—TIME

"Crossroads is told very well. . . . It's Franzen's most sympathetic and most character-driven novel. . . . Gripping. . . . In Crossroads, Franzen sets out to track nothing less than the evolution of an American Dream, from its optimistic peak in the early 1970s to its stark, dark, sad and relentlessly split pessimism today."—The Globe and Mail

"Brims with agile writing. . . . Crossroads is a testament not to the singularity of the '70s but to the decade's continuity with our own. The novel's emotional dishevelments—and its aura of apprehensive urgency—feel viscerally contemporary. If not for the resounding absence of the internet, we could almost forget that the year is supposed to be 1971. . . . A marvelous novel."—The Atlantic