The Mighty Red
The powerful new novel from the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the 2025 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction
'A sweeping, tender-hearted epic' Harper's Bazaar
'In the hands of this master storyteller, everything is effortlessly connected. . . Erdrich always finds hope' Oprah Daily
'The Mighty Red might just be a new American classic' Bookpage
In the Red River Valley of North Dakota, a fraught wedding is taking place.
Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe. Gary thinks Kismet is the answer to his problems. Kismet can't imagine her future, but she will settle for fulfilling his. During a clumsy proposal, Kismet misses her chance to say 'no', and so the die is cast.
Meanwhile Crystal, Kismet's mother, hauls sugar beets for Gary's wealthy family. On her nightly truck drives from the farm, Crystal frets over what the future might hold - both for herself, and her daughter.
Starkly beautiful and vividly written, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendour, from one of our greatest living writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Erdrich (The Night Watchman) follows the folks of the Red River Valley of North Dakota—the original home to the Ojibwe, the Dakota, and the Metis—in a captivating tale of love and everyday life amid environmental upheaval and the 2008 financial crisis. Crystal hauls sugar beets on the Geist family farm and counts her pennies while her partner, Martin, a failed actor who moonlights as a traveling arts teacher, spends money on impractical delights like salsa dancing. They share a daughter, Kismet, 18, who's reviled at her high school for being a goth until Geist scion Gary falls in love with her. Kismet initially rejects Gary, but she's softened by his persistence and agrees to marry him, a prospect Crystal opposes. Then there's Kismet's other suitor, Hugo, a bookish romantic who makes her laugh. At 16, Hugo plans to earn money in the fracking oil fields and save enough to steal Kismet away. The plot thickens when Martin disappears along with the local Catholic church's renovation fund and when reports surface of a bank robber named the Cutie Pie Bandit, who earns their name for being disguised as characters like Rasputin. Threaded throughout the book are references to a tragic accident that ultimately resolves in a satisfying conclusion. Along the way, Erdrich digs deep into the effects of crop farming, pesticides, and the destruction of topsoil on the characters' livelihoods. Erdrich excels at the slow simmer, and once again she delivers a deliciously seductive masterwork.
