The Breakup: A Novel by Kurt Andersen — a penetrating and moving story of a marriage cracking apart as a near-future United States redraws its borders, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland.
It is 2045. Natalie and Asher have been married for twenty-three years, but their relationship has long been marked by quiet fault lines — differences in how they see their fellow Americans and how they navigate an AI-saturated world. After surviving a two-year civil war in the 2030s, they now live on opposite sides of a divided country: Natalie in rural Tennessee in the new Free American Republic, Asher in San Francisco in the remaining United States.
When they are brought back into proximity while touring colleges with their seventeen-year-old, the couple embarks on a road trip through a strange, uncertain American landscape transformed by conflict and technology. Their relationship mirrors the nation’s own unraveling — confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and still impossibly intimate.
As they confront the flux and resilience within their family, they face the same questions the country has been forced to ask: What differences are truly irreconcilable? And when is something broken still worth saving?
Razor-sharp, ambitious, and ranging from tragic to comic, The Breakup is a sweeping novel where the personal and the political intersect in ways that feel bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.
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