“This scorching summer page turner is the perfect summer read,” announced Oprah Winfrey at her July interview with Bruce Holsinger about his new novel Culpability, her book club’s choice as the Book of the Summer 2025. Holsinger described his shock at receiving Winfrey’s phone call to the 90-plus book lovers attending Bluebird Bookshop’s author event at Crozet’s newest vineyard, Fallen Tree, on July 28. “I believe she chose my book because of the themes and the suspense,” he explained.
Holsinger, who teaches medieval literature at the University of Virginia, has published four previous novels—including A Burnable Book (2014), The Invention of Fire (2015), The Gifted School (2019), and The Displacements (2022). Culpability explores the moral ambiguity inherent in artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of a tense family drama. His presentation, moderated by Daily Progress book editor (and former student) Samantha Koon Jones, was introduced by Bluebird co-owner Flannery Buchanan.
Bruce Holsinger’s new novel, Culpability, was chosen as Oprah Winfrey book club’s Book of the Summer 2025. Photo: Beth Kagarise.“For me, stories usually begin with a character or a plot,” Holsinger said. “But in this case, it began with a setting—based on one I had actually encountered while visiting the Northern Neck during the pandemic: a luxurious waterfront compound with a white sand beach, ersatz lighthouse guard tower, and helipad. As I wrote about the Cassidy-Shaw family’s encounter with this setting, the AI layered itself in. This setting almost becomes a character in the novel.”
As Noah Cassidy’s family of five is heading from Maryland to Delaware for his son’s lacrosse tournament in their self-driving, “hands free” SUV, they are all engrossed—Noah is writing a memo on his laptop, Lorelei is writing in her journal, Alice and Izzy are on their phones, and 17-year-old driver Charlie is texting. So, none of them sees the horrific accident—that injures most of them and kills the elderly couple in the other car—coming. We soon learn that everyone in the van played a role in what happened. Like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Culpability explores who or what is responsible for these deaths, and why. After their hospital stay, the family spends a week at the Northern Neck to heal—right across the inlet from this compound.
Over 90 book lovers listened to Holsinger’s presentation, moderated by Samantha Koon Jones at Fallen Tree Vineyard in White Hall. Photo: Beth Kagarise.Embedded in the increasingly intricate plot is the book’s central concern, embodied in the person of Noah’s wife Lorelei Shaw—a renowned AI expert and recipient of a MacArthur genius grant—who studies the ethical dilemmas posed by AI: can we instill a moral sense in the artificial intelligence we create? Can we train machines to be good? “We tend to anthropomorphize these AI tools, giving them names like Siri and Alexa… Their learning algorithms endow them with agency,” argues Lorelei in her book, Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds. But at present these tools are emotionally cold and indifferent. The car, with its built-in cameras and black box recorder, is a witness to the accident, but is it at fault for not avoiding it? The police department has a Digital Vehicle Forensics (DVF) unit to explore these questions during the investigation.
But the philosophical aspects of the novel are subtly addressed, and do not overshadow the engaging and suspenseful plot. The story is told in the first person, from the point of view of Noah—who is relatively clueless about his wife’s research. We come to know and understand each family member as an individual, and can easily relate to the tensions in their various relationships—including Noah and Lorelei’s marriage. “I like to explore the everyday pathologies of the nuclear family,” he joked.
Kathleen Capshaw purchased wine from Lisa Hales, who opened Fallen Tree Vineyard with her husband in October, 2024. Photo: Beth Kagarise.In addition to being compulsively readable, Culpability is disturbing and chilling, in an understated way that hits you hardest after you finish reading it. Various forms of AI share the story with the human characters—including the self-driving vehicle, a chatbot companion, autonomous drones (including weapons), and a smart home. In his interview, Holsinger emphasized that this scenario is not futuristic—everything he describes in the book is happening now. The novel has a mixed media element, including the main story, excerpts from Lorelei’s book, transcripts of daughter Alice’s conversations with her chatbot companion Blair, the transcript of a Senate subcommittee hearing on the use of weaponized drone swarms, and a New Yorker article about their tech billionaire neighbor Daniel Monet, who owns the beachfront compound—and whose daughter Eurydice attracts the attention of son Charlie, leading to further plot complications.
“I’m obsessed with how to create suspense,” he said. In this case, he used short chapters and pushed against sentiment. Holsinger spent three years researching the novel, reading about how AI is being used, interviewing AI professors and practitioners, and reading transcripts of chatbot conversations. “Research sparks my creativity,” he explained. He had people in these fields read the draft of the book. He explored the Deep Research AI tool, “OpenAI’s next agent that can do work for you independently—you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst.”
Photo: Beth Kagarise.Are you aware of AI in your life? Teachers and professors report that all students now use it to help prepare their assignments. “I no longer assign take home essays,” Holsinger commented. Many people, especially teens, interact with chatbot “companions” like Blair. Google now routinely provides an AI summary at the top of its search results—which is sometimes inaccurate. “Hallucination is a real problem,” Holsinger warned—that is, the tendency of AI to make stuff up. The book is dedicated to his students. “I learn so much from my students,” he said. “But I worry about what AI is doing to their learning.” A recent AP-NORC poll found that 40% of all respondents said they have used AI for work tasks or coming up with ideas, while 60% of adults under age 30 have done so.
The event was held at the newest Crozet vineyard, Fallen Tree. Photo: Beth Kagarise.“We know AI is coming and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it,” Oprah concluded. “Thank you for inviting us to explore and wrestle with these very challenging ideas for our times. It tackles an issue that we are just barely beginning to grapple with.” Holsinger hopes his book makes his readers think about slowing down our headlong plunge into artificial intelligence. “AI needs a hard pause,” he declared. But who is listening?
Future Bluebird events are listed at bluebirdcrozet.com. The second annual Crozet Bookfest will be held on October 25.
