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 humour are delightful''Franzen pulls off the extraordinary feat of making the lives of his characters more real to you than your own''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'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.From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family.