The Antidote

(Hardback, Large Print Edition)

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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 town

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsingnot 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 witchs apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the towns secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nations forgettingenacting 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 beenand what still could be.

Reviews

"A singular, haunting vision that fearlessly excavates the past and challenges the reader to face the future head-on. A storytelling tour de force that lives up to the promise of its name." Kirkus (starred review)

"An inspired and unforgettable fusion of the gritty and the fantastic." Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Readers of Margaret Atwood, Emily St. John Mandel, Edan Lepucki, and Lidia Yuknavitch will appreciate Russells brilliant, barbed excavation of an all-too-imaginable future." Library Journal (starred review)

Author Bio

KAREN RUSSELL is the author of six works of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" prize and The New Yorker's "20 under 40" list (She is now decisively over 40).