Oprah Winfrey’s latest book club pick is Culpability by Bruce Holsinger.
Holsinger’s AI-themed novel, published today by Spiegel & Grau, follows the Cassidy-Shaw family, who are involved in a car crash in their self-driving minivan. Each of the family members believe that they are somehow at fault for the accident, which results in the death of an elderly couple. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus wrote of the book, “If you are not already hooked on Holsinger, it’s time to join the club.”
Winfrey announced the book’s selection on CBS Mornings, saying, “I picked it because it is so prescient. It is prescient, it is right now, and it is also the future. And as life would have it, I had just been to one of those tech conferences, and I had seen a demonstration of Waymo, the driverless cars…and then the next day, I get this book.”
CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King asked Holsinger how he came up with the premise for the novel.
“I wanted to think in general about artificial intelligence and what it’s doing to our sense of moral responsibility, how it’s taking away our autonomy, how it’s affecting our lives in so many ways,” he replied.
King noted that the book is composed of several short chapters, and asked Holsinger whether that was deliberate.
“I love short chapters,” he said. “In this case, it’s only one narrator, Noah, the dad, [who] is telling the story in first person. In most of my novels, I have done multiple points of view, longer chapters. This one, I really wanted to experiment. I was trying to make it more suspenseful.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
