The Breakup.jpg
The Breakup.jpg

The Breakup by Kurt Andersen

from $11.99
Hardcover:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A marriage cracks apart as a near-future United States redraws its borders in this penetrating and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland.

“This remarkable book contains multitudes. With wide-ranging intelligence and his trademark wit, Kurt Andersen has written an epic elegy for a country strained past its breaking point.”—Tom Perrotta, author of Ghost Town

Natalie and Asher’s marriage has long been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they view their fellow Americans and navigate AI-suffused life in 2045. After twenty-three years together, and after surviving the two years of civil war in the 2030s, Natalie in rural Tennessee (part of the new Free American Republic) and Asher in San Francisco (in the now smaller United States). Natalie and Asher’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling—confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate.

When Natalie and Asher are brought back into proximity while touring far-flung colleges with their seventeen-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new American landscape, transformed by both the terrorist uprising and technology, all while dealing with the flux—and resilience—within their own family. They face the questions the nation has reckoned with for a generation: what differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?

Razor-sharp, ambitious, ranging from tragic to comic and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping story where the personal and sociopolitical intersect in ways bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A marriage cracks apart as a near-future United States redraws its borders in this penetrating and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland.

“This remarkable book contains multitudes. With wide-ranging intelligence and his trademark wit, Kurt Andersen has written an epic elegy for a country strained past its breaking point.”—Tom Perrotta, author of Ghost Town

Natalie and Asher’s marriage has long been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they view their fellow Americans and navigate AI-suffused life in 2045. After twenty-three years together, and after surviving the two years of civil war in the 2030s, Natalie in rural Tennessee (part of the new Free American Republic) and Asher in San Francisco (in the now smaller United States). Natalie and Asher’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling—confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate.

When Natalie and Asher are brought back into proximity while touring far-flung colleges with their seventeen-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new American landscape, transformed by both the terrorist uprising and technology, all while dealing with the flux—and resilience—within their own family. They face the questions the nation has reckoned with for a generation: what differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?

Razor-sharp, ambitious, ranging from tragic to comic and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping story where the personal and sociopolitical intersect in ways bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.

  • Publisher: Random House

    Title: The Breakup

    Author: Kurt Andersen

    On Sale Date: August 18, 2026

    ISBN 13: 9781984801371

    ISBN 10: 1984801376

    Format: Hardcover

    Retail Price: $30.00

    Page Count: 576 pages

    Dimensions: 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

  • Kurt Andersen is a New York Times bestselling author whose books include Fantasyland, Evil Geniuses, True Believers, Heyday, and Turn of the Century. He co-founded Spy magazine and served as editor-in-chief of New York, and has written as a cultural columnist for Time, The New Yorker, and New York. A graduate of Harvard College, he lives in Brooklyn.

  • Critics and fellow bestselling authors are calling it brilliant, remarkable, and inventive:

    • "This remarkable book contains multitudes. With wide-ranging intelligence and his trademark wit, Kurt Andersen has written an epic elegy for a country strained past its breaking point." — Tom Perrotta, author of Ghost Town

    • "Pairing two divorces—one personal, one national—within a novel that's funny and beautiful is remarkable." — Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Vera, or Faith

    • "The most brilliant social novelist of our time, in the Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo tradition, but funnier and deeper." — Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author

    • "A full, inventive portrait of the next 19 years of American history. It's fun to read." — The New York Times Book Review

This book is for you if

  • You loved the sweeping social satire of Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland and want to see his eye turned on a fractured near-future America.

  • You're drawn to marriage novels where the personal and the political can't be pulled apart.

  • You want a road-trip story that doubles as a state-of-the-union address.

  • You're fascinated by near-future fiction that treats AI, civil unrest, and redrawn borders as lived-in, everyday reality rather than dystopian spectacle.

  • You appreciate novels that are funny and devastating in the same paragraph.

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