Culpability
by Bruce Holsinger
GENRE: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction, Reflective
When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret that implicates them in the accident.
During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident—suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenaged daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI.
Author Biography
Bruce Holsinger is the author of Culpability, the 116th selection of Oprah’s Book Club and hailed by Oprah Winfrey as “a must-read for all generations.” His four previous novels include The Gifted School, a Book of the Month Club selection and winner of the the Colorado Book Award; The Displacements, the inaugural title in the United Nations Read for Action Book Club; and The Invention of Fire and A Burnable Book, historical novels set in medieval London. He’s also written many works of nonfiction, most recently On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, and he has been profiled on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Here & Now, and Marketplace. He is the editor of the quarterly journal New Literary History as well as a frequent instructor at WriterHouse, a nonprofit in Charlottesville. He teaches English at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. - Author's website
Reviews
Publisher's Weekly
Holsinger (The Displacements) plumbs moral responsibility in the age of AI in this twisty family drama. Seventeen-year-old lacrosse star Charlie Cassidy-Shaw is behind the wheel of the family’s self-driving minivan, traveling with his parents and two younger sisters to a tournament, when they collide with another car, killing both passengers. Charlie and his family, however, sustain only minor injuries. In the aftermath, the family returns to a beach house on the Chesapeake Bay to recuperate. When the police hint that the car’s digital forensics might point to Charlie’s guilt, his lawyer father Noah retains a high-priced defense attorney, while his 13-year-old sister Alice texts with her AI-powered “friend” about a secret that would implicate Charlie in the crash, and the app pushes her to confess to their parents. The plot thickens when Charlie’s mother, Lorelei, a prominent AI ethicist, spends time with their tech billionaire neighbor, prompting Noah to worry that she’s having an affair (the truth turns out to be more nefarious). As each family member wrestles with their responsibility for the crash and how much trust they should put in AI, Holsinger grapples evocatively with the trade-offs of automated life. This timely tale leaves readers with much to chew on. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (July) --Staff (Reviewed 07/21/2025) (Publishers Weekly, vol 272, issue 28, p)
Kirkus Reviews
/* Starred Review */ A family heading to their son’s high school lacrosse game is thrown into chaos when their self-driving minivan is involved in a fatal accident. Medieval historian-turned-novelist Holsinger seems to have created his own subgenre of psychosocial thriller, spinning super-smart, propulsive page-turners out of zeitgeisty worries like ultracompetitive school admissions (The Gifted School, 2019), disaster relief (The Displacements, 2022), and now, to absolutely crushing effect, artificial intelligence. On the Cassidy-Shaw family’s way to a weekend tournament on the Eastern Shore of Delaware, paterfamilias Noah is working on a legal memo in the front passenger seat; his 17-year-old son, Charlie, is at the wheel. In the back seat are Alice, 13; Izzy, 11; and their mom, Lorelei, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner who studies the ethical concerns raised by AI. And one is about to unfold before their very eyes when Alice suddenly screams, Charlie jerks the wheel, and they crash into a Honda Accord coming in the other direction. After this explosive opener, the complexities just keep coming—each person in the car has reason to believe the accident was really all their fault. Meanwhile, the Delaware state police have their own ideas about that, ones they continue to pursue even after the family retreats to a vacation rental on the Chesapeake Bay for a week. AI threads through the plot in so many fascinating ways—one of the kids is confiding all her secrets to a chatbot; the vacation rental is a smart house located across the cove from the over-the-top compound of a billionaire AI entrepreneur; a search-and-rescue is managed by drones; almost every time something bad happens, someone staring at a phone was involved. Cleverly threaded through the story are excerpts from Lorelei’s monograph, “Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds,” that sharpen the philosophical and moral issues of the novel.If you are not already hooked on Holsinger, it’s time to join the club. (Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2025)
Sympathy Tower Tokyo
by Rie Qudan
Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of radical sympathy toward criminals has become normalized. The incarcerated are considered victims influenced by their environments to commit crime and are labeled accordingly as Homo miserabilis.
A grand, yet controversial, skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house lawbreakers in compassionate comfort—Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city’s new centerpiece but is filled with doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous—and much younger—boyfriend grows increasingly strained. In search of solace and in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot…
Twist
by Colum McCann
“Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.
Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.
When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?
Signal Fires
by Dani Shapiro
Signal Fires opens on a summer night in 1985. Three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car, and, in an instant, everything on Division Street changes. Each of their lives, and that of Ben Wilf, a young doctor who arrives on the scene, is shattered. For the Wilf family, the circumstances of that fatal accident will become the deepest kind of secret, one so dangerous it can never be spoken.
On Division Street, time has moved on. When the Shenkmans arrive—a young couple expecting a baby boy—it is as if the accident never happened. But when Waldo, the Shenkmans’ brilliant, lonely son who marvels at the beauty of the world and has a native ability to find connections in everything, befriends Dr. Wilf, now retired and struggling with his wife’s decline, past events come hurtling back in ways no one could ever have foreseen.