The Plague of Doves

(Paperback)

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A beautiful, compelling, utterly original new novel from one of the most important American writers of our time, and winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 2012
Pluto, North Dakota, is a town on the verge of extinction. Here, everybody is connected by love or friendship, by blood, and, most importantly, by the burden of a shared history.

Growing up on the reservation is Evelina Harp, witty and ambitious, and prone to falling hopelessly in love. Listening to her grandfather's tales, she learns of a horrific crime that has marked both Ojibwe and whites. Nobody understands it better than Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who keeps watch over Pluto's inhabitants and recounts their lives with compassion and rare insight.

Louise Erdrich's sense of the comic and the tragic sweeps readers along to the surprising conclusion of this stunning novel, a portrait of the complex allegiances, passions and drama of a haunting land and its all-too-human people.

Reviews

'Louise Erdrich's imaginative freedom has reached its zenith -- "The Plague of Doves" is her dazzling masterpiece' Philip Roth 'A masterly new novel!Writing in prose that combines the magical sleight of hand of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the earthy, American rhythms of Faulkner, Ms. Erdrich!has written what is arguably her most ambitious--and in many ways, her most deeply affecting--work yet' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Confirms her reputation as a writer able to combine the apocalyptic with the mundane world whose inhabitants are set loose to roam the heavens in spirit but are ballasted always by their defiantly human bodies.' Observer 'You could read Louise Erdrich's latest book for its wisdom...Or you could read The Plague of Doves for its poetry...in the end, you'll read this book for its stories...The stories told by her characters offer pleasures of language, of humor, of sheer narrative momentum, that shine even in the darkest moments of the book' Boston Globe 'Wholly felt and exquisitely rendered tales of memory and magic...By the novel's end, and in classic Erdrich fashion, every luminous fragment has been assembled into an intricate tapestry that deeply satisfies the mind, the heart, and the spirit' O magazine 'The Plague of Doves is Erdrich's dazzling masterpiece'.' Philip Roth 'A masterly new novel!Writing in prose that combines the magical sleight of hand of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the earthy, American rhythms of Faulkner, Ms. Erdrich!has written what is arguably her most ambitious--and in many ways, her most deeply affecting--work yet.' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times 'You could read Louise Erdrich's latest book for its wisdom...Or you could read The Plague of Doves for its poetry...in the end, you'll read this book for its stories...The stories told by her characters offer pleasures of language, of humor, of sheer narrative momentum, that shine even in the darkest moments of the book.' Boston Globe 'Wholly felt and exquisitely rendered tales of memory and magic...By the novel's end, and in classic Erdrich fashion, every luminous fragment has been assembled into an intricate tapestry that deeply satisfies the mind, the heart, and the spirit'. O magazine Praise for Louise Erdrich: 'Louise Erdrich is the rarest kind of writer, as compassionate as she is sharp-sighted.' Anne Tyler 'Intricate and beautifully written...Erdrich is a writer who believes that life is change and who is never afraid to let her characters experience it.' Margot Livesey, Boston Sunday Globe, on 'The Painted Drum' 'Intimate and epic, tender and violent...Erdrich manages to reveal the hope and fears, the history and gossip, the public and private myths of an entire community. She writes with immense sympathy, without a trace of moralism, and with a grace that makes the most extreme, even gothic, events plausible and convincing.' Francine Prose, People Magazine, on 'The Master Butchers Singing Club' 'Joyful and miraculous...It is no small feat to create a whole world, people it believably, and then record the histories of those people (one thinks of Faulkner and Garcia Marquez), but Louise Erdrich is more than equal to the task.' San Francisco Chronicle on 'The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse'

Author Bio

Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of American novelists. Born in 1954 in Minnesota, she grew up mostly in North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She is the author of a number of novels for adults, the first of which, 'Love Medicine', won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore called The Birchbark.