From the National Book Award-winning author of160;The Corrections, a darkly comedic novel about family Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul151;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 Walter8217;s dreams. Together with Walter151;environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man151;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 Katz151;outr233; rocker and Walter8217;s college best friend and rival151;still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become 147;a very different kind of neighbor,8221; an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street8217;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 Freedom8217;s intensely realized 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.