From the bestselling author of the "wise and addictive" (New York Times) The Gifted School and The Displacements comes a riveting family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence.

Tombolo Books is thrilled to welcome back Bruce Holsinger to celebrate his latest novel, Culpability! Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative.

Holsinger will be in conversation with local poet Jenny Boyar!

More about Culpability

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, implicating them each 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.

Bruce Holsinger is the author of four novels, including The Displacements and The Gifted School, and many works of nonfiction, most recently On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (Yale University Press). His books have been recognized with the Colorado Book Award, the John Hurt Fisher Prize, the Philip Brett Award, the John Nicholas Brown Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Prize for a First Book, and others. 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 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Holsinger teaches in the department of English at the University of Virginia, where he specializes in medieval literature and modern critical thought and serves as editor of the quarterly journal New Literary History. He also teaches craft classes and serves as board chairman for WriterHouse, a local nonprofit in Charlottesville.

Jenny Boyar is a published poet and her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and other scholarly journals. She has been a Fulbright recipient and holds a PhD in English from the University of Rochester, where she focused on medieval and early modern lyric poetry. In her career as a medical writer, she has over a decade of experience within the biotech and pharmaceutical industry.