Our Take

Bruce Holsinger has written one of the sharpest attempts yet to turn our anxieties about artificial intelligence into genuinely compelling fiction, and he does it by keeping the focus tightly on one family rather than sprawling into tech-thriller territory. The premise, a fatal crash involving a self-driving car, is a hook, but the real engine of the book is domestic: how culpability gets negotiated at the dinner table long before it reaches a courtroom. Readers who loved the moral complexity of Jodi Picoult's family dramas or the tech-anxious unease of Dave Eggers' The Circle will find familiar territory here, though Holsinger's prose is quieter and more literary than either. There are also echoes of Celeste Ng's work in the way ordinary family dynamics become the site of much larger cultural reckonings. What sets Culpability apart is its structural intelligence: chapters interspersed with excerpts from an AI ethics book Noah's company is developing, which recontextualize the family's private failures as symptoms of something much bigger. Holsinger never lets the technology overwhelm the human stakes, and that restraint is the book's greatest strength. This is a smart pick for readers who want their book club discussions to wander into ethics and technology without sacrificing character depth. Fans of morally knotty family fiction and cautious techno-skeptics alike will find plenty to chew on.