The Antidote
The new novel from the Pulitzer Prize shortlisted author of Swamplandia!
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
***Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction***
'Powerful' Financial Times
'A pure dust storm of utter genius' DAISY JOHNSON
‘As profound as it is wonderfully strange’ LAUREN GROFF
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.
‘Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude’ KAVEH AKBAR
‘Karen Russell is one in a million’ New York Times
'This novel swept me up and carried me away' TOMMY ORANGE
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The spellbinding latest from Russell (Swamplandia!) infuses a Dust Bowl epic with gothic melodrama. It takes place in 1935 Uz, Neb., where farms have been ruined by a never-ending drought. Many of the residents visit Antonina Rossi, a "prairie witch" who keeps their darkest secrets as part of an occult tradition, advertising her services as an "Antidote to guilt" and other ailments. Among her clients are Harp Oletsky, whose parents emigrated from Poland in 1872 and stood by on their Nebraska homestead while the Pawnee people were driven off their land. After Antonina's memory is wiped clean by the famous Black Sunday dust storm, she meets Harp's niece Dell Oletsky, a 15-year-old basketball phenom whose mother, Lada, has been recently murdered. White hobo Clemson Louis Dew is wrongly convicted of Lada's murder along with several others, and Antonina and Dell band together with Cleo Allfrey, a Black New Deal photographer, to prove Dew is being framed by the corrupt local sheriff. The author's imagination is on full display as she conjures a legacy of prairie witches and depicts the magical qualities of Cleo's camera, which captures the past and future. There's even a sentient scarecrow who bears witness to the dust storms and violence. At the heart of the narrative is the Oletsky family's reckoning with their complicity in the Pawnee people's displacement. It's an inspired and unforgettable fusion of the gritty and the fantastic.
