Kurt Andersen is the bestselling author of Evil Geniuses, Fantasyland, and the novels True Believers, Heyday, and Turn of the Century, among other books. He contributes to The New York Times and was host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award–winning public radio show and podcast. He also writes for television, film, and the stage. Andersen co-founded Spy magazine, served as editor-in-chief of New York, and was a cultural columnist and design critic for Time, New York, and The New Yorker. Andersen graduated from Harvard College and lives in Brooklyn.
“With wide-ranging intelligence and his trademark wit, Kurt Andersen has written an epic elegy for a country strained past its breaking point, and imagined an eerily plausible version of our dark national future.” –Tom Perrotta
A marriage cracks apart as a near-future United States redraws its borders in this penetrating and moving novel from The New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland.
Natalie and Asher’s marriage has long been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they view their fellow Americans and navigate AI-suffused life in 2045. After 23 years together, and after surviving the two years of civil war in the 2030s, Natalie in rural Tennessee (part of the new Free American Republic) and Asher in San Francisco (in the now smaller United States).Natalie and Asher’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling—confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate.
When Natalie and Asher are brought back into proximity while touring far-flung colleges with their 17-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new American landscape, transformed by both the terrorist uprising and technology, all while dealing with the flux—and resilience—within their own family. They face the questions the nation has reckoned with for a generation: what differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?
Razor-sharp, ambitious, ranging from tragic to comic and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping story where the personal and sociopolitical intersect in ways bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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