The Antidote
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Summary
‘Karen Russell is one in a million’ New York Times
From the Pulitzer shortlisted author, an astounding novel about magic, memory and land set America’s Dust Bowl.
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.
But after the great dust storm that flattens wheatfields, buries houses and kills a newlywed couple just a few feet from their car, the Antidote wakes up empty – as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever find out, her life will be in danger.
To the Antidote’s surprising defence come a farmer, his basketball-playing niece and a Black photographer with her time-travelling camera. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them to this lonely brink. Together, they face down the tornado coming their way.
The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting – theft, dispossession, wilful blindness, passed on generation to generation. The Dust Bowl echo with warnings of our own time, daring to challenge us with what might have been – and what still could be.
‘A brilliant writer with an amazing imagination’ The Times
From the Pulitzer shortlisted author, an astounding novel about magic, memory and land set America’s Dust Bowl.
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.
But after the great dust storm that flattens wheatfields, buries houses and kills a newlywed couple just a few feet from their car, the Antidote wakes up empty – as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever find out, her life will be in danger.
To the Antidote’s surprising defence come a farmer, his basketball-playing niece and a Black photographer with her time-travelling camera. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them to this lonely brink. Together, they face down the tornado coming their way.
The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting – theft, dispossession, wilful blindness, passed on generation to generation. The Dust Bowl echo with warnings of our own time, daring to challenge us with what might have been – and what still could be.
‘A brilliant writer with an amazing imagination’ The Times
Reviews
This novel swept me up and carried me away, even while somehow burying me, and digging up something about the story of [America] I didn’t know I needed to know
TOMMY ORANGE, author of Wandering Stars
