Franzen Jonathan. Freedom

Deeper, funnier, sadder and truer than a work of fiction has any right to be''Head and shoulders above any other book this year: moving, funny and unexpectedly beautiful. I missed it when it was over''A cat's cradle of family life, and if the measure of a good book is its afterburn, 'Freedom' is a great book''I loved 'Freedom'. His acute observations of emotional faultlines, his dialogue and above all his wry humor are delightful''Franzen pulls off the extraordinary feat of making the lives of his characters more real to you than your''No question about it: 'Freedom' swept everything before it in intricately observed, humane, unprejudiced armfuls. There was no novel to touch it in 2010''By the end of 'Freedom' you may feel you understand its protagonists better than you know anyone in the world around you''The novel of the year. Its portrait of a marriage, luminously and wittily drawn against a backdrop of modern America, is as good as literature gets'