An international bestseller and the novel of the year, 'Freedom' is an epic of contemporary love and marriage. This is the story of the Berglunds, their son Joey, their daughter Jessica and their friend Richard Katz. It is about how we use and abuse our freedom; about the beginning and ending of love; teenage lust; the unexpectedness of adult life; why we compete with our friends; how we betray those closest to us; and why things almost never work out as they 'should'. It is a story about the human heart, and what it leads us to do to ourselves and each other.

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 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.

The winner of the National Book Award, the New York Times No.1 Bestseller and the worldwide literary sensation, 'The Corrections' has established itself as a truly great American novel. The Lamberts — Enid and Alfred and their three grown-up children — are a troubled family living in a troubled age. Alfred is ill and as his condition worsens the whole family must face the failures, secrets and long-buried hurts that haunt them if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs. Stretching from the Midwest in the mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of globalised greed, The Corrections brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty into wild collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and New Economy millionaires. It confirms Jonathan Franzen's position as one of the most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul currently at work.

The critically acclaimed first novel from Jonathan Franzen, author of the prize winning and internationally bestselling, The Corrections. St. Louis, Missouri, is a quietly dying river city until it hires a new police chief: a charismatic young woman from Bombay, India, named S. Jammu. No sooner has Jammu been installed, though, than the city's leading citizens become embroiled in an all-pervasive political conspiracy. A classic of contemporary fiction, 'The Twenty-Seventh City' shows us an ordinary metropolis turned inside out, and the American Dream unraveling into terror and dark comedy.

'The Harper's Essay' is reprinted in this volume alongside personal essays and painstaking, often funny reportage. Although his subjects range widely, each piece wrestles with the erosion of civic life and private dignity, and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern America.