The Breakup - by Kurt Andersen (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - A marriage cracks apart as a near-future United States redraws its borders in this penetrating and moving novel from the author of Fantasyland.

"This remarkable book contains multitudes. With wide-ranging intelligence and his trademark wit, Kurt Andersen has written an epic elegy for a country strained past its breaking point."--Tom Perrotta, author of Ghost Town

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 twenty-three 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 seventeen-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.

Review Quotes

"Great book! Pairing two divorces--one personal, one national--within a novel that's funny and beautiful is something few writers could do. Thank you, universe, for Kurt Andersen and this page-turner."--Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Vera, or Faith

"A full, inventive, elaborately detailed portrait of . . . the next 19 years of American history. It's fun to read."--The New York Times Book Review

"Kurt Andersen plumbs the depths of our national struggle as a metaphor for a personal one . . . and vice versa. Simultaneously amusing and distressing, Clever, nuanced, and a joy."--Jake Tapper, CNN Anchor and New York Times bestselling author

"Kurt Andersen is the most brilliant social novelist of our time, in the tradition of Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo, but even funnier and deeper. With a light touch and instinct for telling details, he mixes pitch-perfect satire with profound insights."--Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

"One of our most brilliantly observant and thoughtful writers is compelling us to contemplate an American future of disunion and AI domination in a novel that is all the more powerful for its sobriety, its realism, and, yes, its humanity."--Jon Meacham, #1 New York Times bestselling author of American Struggle

"With wit, fizz, and that rare ability to articulate big ideas that haven't yet been articulated, Andersen perceives the world on a different frequency from the rest of us."--Jennifer Senior, Pulitzer Prize-winning Atlantic writer and New York Times bestselling author

"Intoxicating . . . [Kurt Andersen] does things with words no one else can."--Stephen Dubner, New York Times bestselling author of Freakonomics

"Explores the implications of economics, AI, media, politics, science, and other elements as they shape both the country and the individuals who live within it."--Chicago Tribune

"A speculative state-of-the-nation novel . . . refreshingly full of absorbing characters. . . . In Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses, Andersen traced the fault lines that have threatened the American experiment ever since its foundation . . . The Breakup is in many ways an imaginative sequel to his recent nonfiction, except that his polemical gifts are coupled here with a Dickensian flair for comedy."--Air Mail

"Andersen's love and grief over what's happened and is happening to this country spill onto every page."--Newcity Lit

"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, author of Ghost Town

"It is Kurt Andersen's oracular perversity that one of the few institutions that survive the country's demise is the college tour. So here is one last American road trip . . . confronting the great question Robert Frost posed: What to make of a diminished thing? And as Garry Shandling would say, No flipping--the ending is pure Hitchcock."--Caitlin Flanagan, author of Girl Land

"A harrowing and profound social satire set in the near future, rich in characters and insight, sometimes painful, often funny, beautifully written."--Anne Lamott

"A rich, incisive study of manners and morals in the American twenty-first century . . . Pointed, funny and unnerving, The Breakup conveys a sense of inevitability."--Susanna Moore

"Road trip meets corporate intrigue meets political violence in an ultra-polarized near-future America."--Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Kurt Andersen is the author of the recent New York Times bestsellers Evil Geniuses and Fantasyland, as well as several bestselling novels, including You Can't Spell America Without Me, Heyday, and Turn of the Century. With Steven Soderbergh he co-created the dystopian comedy series Command Z. He co-founded Spy magazine and hosted the Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast Studio 360. A regular contributor to The New York Times and The Atlantic, he was previously editor-in-chief of New York and a columnist for The New Yorker. He grew up in Nebraska, graduated from Harvard, and lives in New York City with his wife Anne Kreamer.