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Culpability
- Author
- Bruce Holsinger
- Narrator
- January LaVoy, Stacy Carolan
- Publisher
- Europa Editions
- Publish Date
- 11 September 2025
- Run Time
- 10 hours 21 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
- Rating
- 5.0 (1 review)
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What to expect
"Compelling."―Literary Review
"An irresistibly anxious book."―The Washington Post
"A family drama with a shocking twist." ―The New York Times
"I was riveted until the very last shocking sentence!"―Oprah Winfrey
When the Cassidy-Shaws' driverless minivan fatally collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver's seat. His father, Noah, is beside him, and in the back with his younger siblings is his mother, Lorelei—a renowned AI researcher—who is lost in her work.
During a weeklong retreat on the Chesapeake Bay, the Cassidy-Shaws wrestle with the moral fallout of the crash as a routine police enquiry starts to unravel. As Lorelei's increasingly odd behaviour stirs her husband's suspicions that there may be a darker truth behind the incident, the arrival of tech billionaire Daniel Monet (who has a mysterious history with Lorelei) cements them. When Charlie falls for Monet's teenage daughter, tensions among the Cassidy-Shaws reach breaking point.
A psychosocial thriller and a propulsive family drama, Culpability explores a world newly shaped by non-human forces such as chatbots and autonomous cars, and forces us to examine our own relationship to artificial intelligence, and the nuanced ways in which we are all, in fact, culpable.
Critics Review
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"A thought-provoking and riveting meditation on family, parental love, morality and artificial intelligence—and where they all intersect. Wise, propulsive, and deeply powerful."
Laura Dave, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me
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"Reminiscent of the work of Richard Powers and Don DeLillo, Culpability is a compelling narrative about the perils of the digital age."
Mary Morris, author of The Red House
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"A beachy family drama with a shocking twist."
The New York Times
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"The human race wakes every morning with a new worry, and among such anxieties at present is artificial intelligence. Bruce Holsinger's Culpability functions efficiently on a variety of levels as family drama, thriller and a sober examination of what current technological developments have in store for us."
Financial Times
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" Culpability is a stark reminder of our vulnerability to AI and the dangers posed by omnipresent technology."
Literary Review
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" A well-paced, entertaining mystery and a timely meditation on emergent technology's moral implications."
TLS
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"Zeitgeisty page-turner."
Daily Mail
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"Holsinger seems to have created his own subgenre of psychosocial thriller, spinning super-smart, propulsive page-turners out of zeitgeisty worries . . . If you are not already hooked on Holsinger, it's time to join the club."
Kirkus (starred review)
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"A thought-provoking and riveting meditation on family, parental love, morality and artificial intelligence—and where they all intersect."
Laura Dave, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me
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"A wildly timely book, an exploration of the ethics of the technology age tucked inside a gripping story about family and loyalty."
Janelle Brown, author of What Kind of Paradise
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"A thriller with a brain. Reminiscent of the work of Richard Powers and Don DeLillo, Culpability is a compelling narrative about the perils of the digital age while addressing the challenges of living as a family. This novel might feel futuristic, except it isn't. It's happening now."
Mary Morris, author of The Red House
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"Whip-smart, fascinating, and gripping. It reads fast like a thriller, but this novel takes on the great cultural challenges of today: AI, electronic surveillance, and billionaire culture. A successful but fragile family collides with these forces and wrestles them down to life-size.
Stephen Kiernan, author of The Glass Chateau and The Baker's Secret
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"Part family drama, part techno-thriller, this riveting novel traces the moral fallout of a self-driving car crash through the lens of a fractured family. With piercing insight and deep compassion, Holsinger captures the unsettling drift between human intention and algorithmic consequence—never losing sight of the fragile, fallible people at the heart of the story. Gripping, wise, and eerily prescient, Culpability is a family novel for the age of AI."
Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train
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"Powerful and immensely thought-provoking. A novel with its finger absolutely on the pulse."
Quentin Bates, author of Cold Malice
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"In this tightly paced novel, domestic intrigue is transposed into the fraught world of AI. . . . This Zeitgeisty discussion is balanced with plenty of drama: as it turns out, the family vacation house is next to a compound owned by a shady tech billionaire—a discovery that unleashes a torrent of deception."
The New Yorker
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Bruce Holsinger tackles timely topics and the ties that bind in Culpability . . . a who's who of hot-button issues, including AI, corporate greed, tech addiction.... But the topic most likely to spark appreciative group texts among book club members of a certain age has to do with a less trendy subject: teenagers. Specifically, the relationship between a father and his 17-year-old son, which Holsinger depicts in all its maddening complexity.... We meet them at a tender time—a 'hinge of life,'—and Holsinger does it justice."
The New York Times
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"For all its eerie timeliness, Culpability should age better than yesterday's Instagram post. Holsinger, a medievalist at the University of Virginia, has a sharp eye for the eternal values and foibles that animate human affairs. . . . The plot of his latest book [is] a searching examination of family dynamics and the burdens that no machine will ever lift for us."
The Washington Post
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"Secrets swirl and the stakes rise in this sharply modern family drama."
People (“Best New Book”)
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"Holsinger seems to have created his own subgenre of psychosocial thriller, spinning super-smart, propulsive page-turners out of zeitgeisty worries . . . If you are not already hooked on Holsinger, it's time to join the club."
Kirkus (starred review)
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"In this twisty family drama... Holsinger grapples evocatively with the trade-offs of automated life. This timely tale leaves readers with much to chew on."
Publishers Weekly
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"A taut psychological thriller about secrets, ambition and the lies we tell ourselves and others."
Seattle Times
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"Culpability is the thinking man's page-turner, absolutely of the moment."
Newsday
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"Holsinger combines a moving family drama with propulsive page-turning action that tackles some of the most complicated issues of today."
CrimeTimes
User Reviews
Book 5.0
Narration 5.0
- No written reviews yet.
Details
- Author
- Bruce Holsinger
- Narrator
- January LaVoy, Stacy Carolan
- Duration
- 10 hours 21 minutes
- Release Date
- 11 September 2025
- ISBN
- 9781787706422
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Europa Editions
- Genre
- Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general
- Rating
- 5.0(1 review)
- Narration
- 5.0(1 review)
Synopsis
"Compelling."―Literary Review "An irresistibly anxious book."―The Washington Post "A family drama with a shocking twist." ―The New York Times "I was riveted until the very last shocking sentence!"―Oprah Winfrey When the Cassidy-Shaws' driverless minivan fatally collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver's seat. His father, Noah, is beside him, and in the back with his younger siblings is his mother, Lorelei—a renowned AI researcher—who is lost in her work. During a weeklong retreat on the Chesapeake Bay, the Cassidy-Shaws wrestle with the moral fallout of the crash as a routine police enquiry starts to unravel. As Lorelei's increasingly odd behaviour stirs her husband's suspicions that there may be a darker truth behind the incident, the arrival of tech billionaire Daniel Monet (who has a mysterious history with Lorelei) cements them. When Charlie falls for Monet's teenage daughter, tensions among the Cassidy-Shaws reach breaking point. A psychosocial thriller and a propulsive family drama, Culpability explores a world newly shaped by non-human forces such as chatbots and autonomous cars, and forces us to examine our own relationship to artificial intelligence, and the nuanced ways in which we are all, in fact, culpable.
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