Jonathan Franzen's big new novel, "Freedom," which is half-set in Minnesota, isn't out until September, but already booksellers are hoping that it will be a giant seller in the last quarter of 2010.

If you haven't already ready the first two chapers, which appeared in The New Yorker, you can do so here and here.

To read the Publishers Weekly starred review, go here.

To see how British booksellers are drooling over the as-yet-unpublished book, go here.

"Freedom" is Franzen's fourth novel, but his first since "The Corrections" was published in 2001. It centers on the marriage of Gopher women's basketball star Patty Emerson and Hibbing-born Walter Berglund, who attends Macalester College and later works for 3M. More than a third of the book takes place in St. Paul, where the newlywed Berglunds buy and renovate a crumbling Victorian in a dicey block of Ramsey Hill. It's full of local references, from the Longhorn bar to Walker Art Center and various University of Minnesota locations. Up north also gets attention, in scenes of Walter's Hibbing childhood, and ones set at the Berglund's cabin on Nameless Lake.

Later, the Berglunds move to Washington, D.C., and their children go away to college. The plot develops as serious fissures appear in their marriage, in part thanks to Richard Katz, a punk rocker who achieves fame as an alt-country star and who moves between best-friend status with Walter and an affair with Patty

Like "Freedom," Franzen's "The Corrections" also centered on family and dysfunction, with healthy doses of hilarity and biting social satire mixed in with the pathos. "The Corrections" won a National Book Award and became an international bestseller. A famous footnote on the earlier book occurred when it was named to the Oprah Book Club, a recognition that Franzen initially declined.

To see more about the new book, go to the Farrar, Straus and Giroux website.