"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.

“A thought-provoking and riveting meditation on family, parental love, morality and artificial intelligence—and where they all intersect.”

Bruce Holsinger is the author of four novels, including The Displacements and The Gifted School, and many works of non-fiction. 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 and Vanity Fair, and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches in the department of English at the University of Virginia, where he specialises in medieval literature and modern critical thought.