The Breakup - by Kurt Andersen (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A penetrating and moving novel about a crumbling marriage, set against the backdrop of a near-future America in the process of its own disintegration, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses

Natalie and Asher's marriage has long been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they see the world and the lives they imagined within it. Now with both children nearly grown, their own ambitions at cross purposes, and a world transformed by AI, it feels like they have less in common than ever. After twenty-three years together, they're living apart.

As they navigate the terms of their separation, America is doing the same thing. It's 2045, and the country is in the throes of a complex, years-long process of redrawing borders after an awful 2030s uprising that ended with red states seceding to form their own government, and blue cities breaking off from those states. While Natalie retreats to her childhood home in Tennessee--most of the state now part of the new Free American Republic--Asher stays behind in San Francisco, running the controversial National Institute of the Mind for a quixotic trillionaire and parenting their younger child, Logan. Apart for the first time in decades, Natalie and Asher's relationship becomes a mirror of America's own long unraveling--confused, messy, painful, and impossibly intimate.

When Natalie and Asher are forced back into proximity while touring colleges with Logan, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain postwar American landscape, while confronting the flux within their own family. And they are faced with the question the nation already reckoned with: Is something broken still worth saving?

Razor-sharp, ambitious, at turns tragic and funny, brimming with imagination and surprises, The Breakup is a sweeping story where the personal and sociopolitical intersect in ways bracingly prescient and keenly insightful. And in the end, surprisingly hopeful.

About the Author

Kurt Andersen is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Evil Geniuses and Fantasyland, as well as bestselling novels, among them You Can't Spell America Without Me, Heyday, and Turn of the Century. With Steven Soderbergh he recently co-created the streaming sci-fi series Command Z. He co-founded Spy magazine and co-created and hosted the Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast Studio 360. He's a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Atlantic, and was previously editor-in-chief of New York as well as a columnist for The New Yorker. He grew up in Nebraska, went to Harvard, and lives in New York City.