$25.15

+ $3.90 Delivery

Only 1 left in stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon US.

Share <Embed>

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 3 images

Follow the Author

Jonathan Franzen

Freedom Paperback – 3 March 2011

by Jonathan Franzen (Author)

1,268 ratings

See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Amazon Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$15.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

—

$21.12

—

Paperback

"Please retry"

$16.19

—

Paperback, 3 March 2011

$25.15

—

Audio CD, Audiobook, CD, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$8.77

—

Arrives: 15 - 23 March

Fastest delivery: 5 - 9 March

US imports may differ from local products. Additional terms apply. Learn More.

There is a newer edition of this item:

Freedom
$16.19
(1,268)
In stock.

The acclaimed new novel from the author of The Corrections.

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 neighbour 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, 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 old college friend and rival - still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to poor Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbour," 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 too much 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 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.

Amazon Global Store

International products have separate terms and are sold from abroad and may differ from local products including fit, age rating, and language of product, labeling, or instructions.
Manufacturer warranty may not apply but you may have other rights under law.
Learn more about Amazon Global Store

Special offers and product promotions

Buy this item and get 90 days Free Amazon Music Unlimited. After purchase you will receive an email with further information. Offer valid for a limited time only. Terms and Conditions apply.” Learn more here.

Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Jonathan Franzen
1,112
Paperback
$17.99

Product details

Publisher : Fourth Estate (3 March 2011)
Language : English
Paperback : 570 pages
ISBN-10 : 0007318529
ISBN-13 : 978-0007318520
Dimensions : 15.3 x 3.1 x 23.4 cm

Customer Reviews:
1,268 ratings

Product description

Review

'Head and shoulders above any other book this year: moving, funny and unexpectedly beautiful. I missed it when it was over' Sam Mendes, Observer, Books of the Year

'A cat's cradle of family life, and if the measure of a good book is it's afterburn, Freedom is a great book' Kirsty Wark Observer, Books of the Year

'I loved Freedom. His acute observations of emotional faultlines, his dialogue and above all his wry humour are delightful' Antony Beevor Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

'Franzen pulls off the extraordinary feat of making the lives of his characters more real to you than your own' David Hare, Guardian, Books of the Year

'No question about it: Freedom swept everything before it in intricately observed, humane, unprejudiced armfuls. There was no novel to touch it in 2010.' Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

'Undoubtedly a great novel about America. Rarely has the land of the free been scrutinised with such a sharp but loving eye' Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

'It had me absolutely hooked' Mark Watson, Observer, Books of the Year

'By the end of Freedom you may feel you understand its protagonists better than you know anyone in the world around you' Nicholas Hytner Evening Standard, Books of the Year

'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' Sarah Sands, New Statesman, Books of the Year

About the Author

Jonathan Franzen’s work includes four novels (The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections, Freedom), two collections of essays (Farther Away, How To Be Alone), a memoir (The Discomfort Zone), and, most recently, The Kraus Project. He is recognised as one of the best American writers of our age and has won many awards. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Customer reviews

5 star		49%
4 star		20%
3 star		11%
2 star		9%
1 star		11%

How are ratings calculated?

Review this product

Write a customer review

Top reviews from Australia

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Greenfairy

Loved it!

Reviewed in Australia on 23 September 2015

Verified Purchase

Life, love, betrayal and redemption. A college basketball player forgoes a sports career to marry a good and decent man with whom she is not really in love. She is besotted with his womanising, seemingly unattainable best friend who is a musician. The consequences of this decision will play out over several decades. This epic book has it all. The superbly drawn characters became real to me as they struggled to find meaning in their lives. This was an excellent study of the psychology of relationships, but above all it was a very human story. Brilliant writing. This is my first go at a Jonathon Franzen book. I will definitely be reading more of his work.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Amazon Customer

It's a story well told but I didn't really care about it.

Reviewed in Australia on 3 August 2019

Verified Purchase

Good writing but I couldn't identify with the characters and I didn't really care what happened. I didn't really get the social commentary (if that was the point) but I don't live in the USA, so maybe that's why.

Helpful

Fiona Steinberg

I ended up just skimming over the more boring bits. I won't be seeking out any more ...

Reviewed in Australia on 13 January 2016

Verified Purchase

This was such a long winded, wordy book! It took absolutely forever to read, and what could have been said in 200 pages, took 600. I ended up just skimming over the more boring bits. I won't be seeking out any more of his work, that's for sure!

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Mrs Roslyn Ridgeway

A very thought provoking story

Reviewed in Australia on 20 July 2014

Verified Purchase

A great insight into human nature and all its complexities. Excellent reading told in an unusual way with some light humour

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Tealady2000

There but for the grace of God go all of us

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 May 2016

Verified Purchase

Based on other reviews, this seems to be a real Marmite book, with people either loving it or loathing it. I got it free as some kind of Kindle special offer and I was a bit apprehensive starting it because it has a lot of negative reviews. But luckily for me, it grabbed me immediately and I really enjoyed it. It is a family saga, centred around an ageing couple and their three grown-up children, and I think my enjoyment stemmed from the fact that the dynamics were so instantly familiar. I must admit that my pleasure was tempered in places by the fact that the familiarity was incredibly close to the bone. The story touches on many universal themes - the difficulties we have coping as we get older, the expectations that the older generation have of the younger generation, the need of the younger generation to build their own lives, and the conflicts that all this brings. Despite these "heavy" issues, the book has a humorous tone, and although it is very long, it is extremely well written. I haven't read any Jonathan Franzen before and I was very impressed with his literary style.

8 people found this helpful

Top Cat

I really grew to love these characters

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 July 2020

Verified Purchase

Franzen writes such brilliant characters. This isn't a book about plot, although I really enjoyed discovering how the story unfolded. Instead, this is about gaining an understanding of how the characters tick. And Franzen does this brilliantly. You heard the voice of each main character and grow to love them. And then you move on to another, while the plot gives structure. Superb.

S. B. Kelly

Playing Unhappy Families

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 April 2012

Verified Purchase

Tolstoy said that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but I've never really believed that. Certainly, the families of Walter and Patty Berglund are very similar: each of them is the outsider, the family scapegoat, bullied by both parents and siblings. That should perhaps make them a natural couple, but Patty really yearns for Walter's cool friend Richard, the laid-back, womanising musician. In the end, she settles for Walter and they build a life together in small-town Minnesota with two children of their own.

It would be easy to dislike Patty but I didn't. She's an innocent who, when she does bad things, does them not out of malice but almost accidentally. Her one great gift, as a basketball player, is taken from her by injury. Mild-mannered Walter, meanwhile, with his endless concerns for the environment and zero-population growth, matures into a man nearly burned alive by anger.

At first I found the prose style annoying, with its very long, rambling, unstructured sentences (I found one that went on for two pages), but I got used to it after a while and it ceased to bother me. The chapters are also long, each centred on one member of the small group of main characters, some of them a sort of autobiography written by Patty, which will come back to bite her in the end.

This is a profoundly sad book: people are unhappy; government is corrupt; big business amoral and self-seeking. The fact that it manages to end on a note of hope is a small blessing. Franzen's message may be the same as Forster's in Howard's End -- that what matters is personal relations and being kind to each other.

7 people found this helpful

Pauline Butcher Bird

21st century Tolstoy attempt

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 July 2013

Verified Purchase

Franzen's attempt to write a 21st century Tolstoy-style novel almost works except that in Tolstoy's day there was no widespread discussion of the issues so it made sense to have Tolstoy's characters debate land possession, the rights of the proletariat and so on, whereas today we have the internet where the pros and cons of population growth, the Iraq War, or the Environment have already been thrashed to a halt, and so when Franzen repeats them in this novel, they don't carry the same weight and I skipped all the political sections.

What Franzen is so good at is family relations and for me, a female, he gives a wondrous look into the masculine mind and sexual drive. Anne Tyler, who insists on writing novels from the male point of view should read this book closely.

I found both the sex-crazed Richard and the anal retentive Walter more convincing than the heroine, Patty, whose later persona as a mixed up mother and wife does not follow well from her teenage years as an outstanding athlete.

Still, Jonathan is a formidable writer and I think deserves all the accolades.
[...]

One person found this helpful

E. Clarke

witty riffs, etc

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 July 2011

Verified Purchase

This is a hugely enjoyable book, mainly because of the excellent writing. The framework is, I suppose, modern American life. I guess it helps a little not to be American, so you can discount the many implausiblilities by telling yourself, ah, well, I suppose this could happen in America. (I was surprised at how many of the local references and current argot were unfamiliar/impenetrable to me). The characters are not exactly grotesques, but there is something of the Dickensian exaggeration about them, which makes it all the more suprising that I was often very moved (at least twice to tears) by what happened to them. But the family saga framework is intricately and skillfully worked out, without exactly being a plot. Franzen manages to touch on just about every current modern theme, most obviously, environmentalism and freedom, though strangely he avoids racism - blacks and the poor get one, totally insignificant walk-on part each. All the themes are treated comprehensively, and all are shown to be intractable. As is the main theme of the book, the puzzling phenonomeon of love. Given the intractability of this, I can't blame him for his method of bringing the book to a conclusion (and not just because I was totally unconvinced at the same time as being totally moved).
I was, though, utterly mesmerised by the writing - the prose, and the storytelling, of course, but most of all the constantly surprising and interesting riffs on all sorts of subthemes - in politics, economics, environmentalism, family life, community life, etc. I liked so many of them, and loved the one on cats.

I mentionded Dickens, and I suppose the most surprising thing about this book is how old fashioned it really is and how modern it really feels. In this last regard, his treatment of sex is exemplary. Its insistent and troubling nature is there for all to see (and feel!).All its variations are graphically allowed their spot in the limelight (at least the heterosexual ones - the strong, male loves are convncingly matey, and certainly no basis for a life), but it is surrounded by neither moralising mystery nor sub-teen prurience or porn. There is also no feeling of having a writerly sex interlude, it is all part of the grand story. Is that what modern sex is?

2 people found this helpful

See all reviews

Follow the Author

Similar authors to follow

Freedom Paperback – 3 March 2011

Amazon Global Store

There is a newer edition of this item:

Amazon Global Store

Special offers and product promotions

Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought

Product details

Product description

Review

About the Author

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Customer reviews

Review this product

Top reviews from Australia

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries