The Antidote
Karen Russell
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From the publisher
An exceptional novel set in the 1930s Dust Bowl about magic, memory and land; above all, a reckoning with America's wilfully forgotten history
'A pure dust storm of utter genius' DAISY JOHNSON
‘As profound as it is wonderfully strange’ LAUREN GROFF
‘Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude’ KAVEH AKBAR
What do we choose to remember and what do we allow ourselves to forget?
Visit the Antidote of Uz – a prairie witch who can keep your memories safe. Speak into her emerald-green earhorn, and your secrets, your shames, your private joys, will leave your mind and enter hers.
Until the Black Sunday storm, which flattens wheatfields, buries houses and vaporizes every memory stored inside the Antidote. She wakes up empty – as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever discover the truth, her life will be in danger.
To the Antidote’s surprising defence comes Asphodel – young tearaway, girls’ basketball captain and aspiring prairie witch – who won’t take no for an answer. Along with her Polish wheat-farmer uncle and a New Deal photographer with an enchanted camera, they must confront what has cursed this town: its land on the brink of ruin and its people on the edge of starvation. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them here. Together, they face down the storm coming their way.
The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting – the wilful omissions passed down from generation to generation. This gripping Dust Bowl epic echoes with urgent warnings for our own time, daring us to imagine what might have been – and what still could be.
‘Karen Russell is one in a million’ New York Times
'This novel swept me up and carried me away' TOMMY ORANGE