The Antidote
Books | Fiction / Literary
Karen Russell
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • THE 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 townA Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from Lit Hub, Marie Claire, TIME, Vulture, Esquire, People, The Chicago Review of Books, and BookPageThe 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. The Antidote 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. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
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Author
Karen Russell
Pages
432
Publisher
Random House
Published Date
2025-03-11
ISBN
059380225X 9780593802250
Community ReviewsSee all
"Magic, despair and meanness collide in this sweeping tale of people in Uz Nebraska watching their livelihoods slip away as dust storms rip apart decades of poor farming. If that were the only story this book told, it would be like many others. Karen Russell unveils a fantastical conceit in this story: In a small, poor community, the truths and secrets people cannot bear to utter or remember — some focused on White residents taking Native land — get “deposited” inside the trance-like subconscious of a woman called the Antidote. Her skills (and the loss of her skills) serve as a chief catalyst for the unfolding stories told by human, animal and inanimate characters. The four main characters — Harp, Dell, Cleo and the Antidote (aka Antoniona) — form a loose family, nearly all dogged by sadness, loneliness, loss and murder. An imaginative story that resonates. The acknowledgment at the book’s end outlines the story: “The Antidote uses fantastical conceits to illuminate the holes in people’s private and collective memories, the willful omissions passed down generation to generation, and the myths that have been used by the U.S. government and White settlers to justify crimes against the citizens of Native Nations and the theft of Native lands.”"
Diane Morello
