NATIONAL BESTSELLER - T
HE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
EDITORS' CHOICE - From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of
Swamplandia!
and
Vampires in the Lemon Grove
Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town
The Antidote
opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing--not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories.
follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples' memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch's apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town's secrets and its fate. Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation's forgetting--enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities.
echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been--and what still could be.