Purchase

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Kobo

Apple Books

Google Play

Books-A-Million

Indie BookShop

Ripped Bodice

Add to Wish List

Also by Jonathan Franzen:

Crossroads, October 2021
Hardcover / e-Book
Purity, September 2015
Hardcover / e-Book
Freedom, September 2010
Hardcover
The Discomfort Zone, September 2006
Hardcover
The Corrections, September 2002
Paperback (reprint)

FREEDOM
By: Jonathan Franzen

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 2010
On Sale: August 31, 2010
576 pages
ISBN: 0374158460
EAN: 9780374158460
Hardcover
Add to Wish List

Fiction Family Life

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 the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total 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 college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” 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 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 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.

Media Buzz

Studio 360 - March 30, 2013
Studio 360 - September 3, 2011
On Point - December 30, 2010
On Point - December 30, 2010
On Point - December 6, 2010
On Point - December 6, 2010
Oprah - December 6, 2010
PBS News Hour - October 12, 2010
Good Morning America - September 27, 2010
Oprah - September 17, 2010
Good Morning America - September 13, 2010
All Things Considered - September 12, 2010
Saturday Early Show - September 11, 2010
Studio 360 - September 11, 2010
Fresh Air - NPR - September 9, 2010
All Things Considered - September 4, 2010
All Things Considered - August 5, 2010