Kurt B. Andersen is an American writer, the author of novels and histories, four of them New York Times bestsellers. He is also a screenwriter and regularly contributes to the Times and the Atlantic. He was a co-founder of Spy magazine, and host of the weekly Peabody Award-winning public radio program Studio 360.

The Breakup is his fifth novel. It’s 2045 and Natalie and Asher’s 23-year marriage has long-standing fault lines over what they think of their fellow Americans and of AI-saturated modern life. In 2045, having survived the two-year civil war together, they’re now living separately for the first time since they met. Millennial Asher is in San Francisco with their daughter; Gen-Z Natalie has retreated to her home state of Tennessee in the borderlands of the US and new Free American Republic. The couple’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling — confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate. Brought back together for a sprawling college tour with their 17-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new carved-up America, all while dealing with the flux — and resilience — in their own family. With the hovering question: What differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?

Ranging from tragic to comic to suspenseful, and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping tale of the personal and sociopolitical intersecting –– bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.

Roxana Robinson will serve as Interlocutor. She is the author of eleven books—seven novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, three as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, The Southampton Review, Epiphany and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR.

Books will be available for sale and signing. Registration is required at cornwalllibrary.org.