The Antidote

· Random House
Ebook
400
Pages
Eligible
This book will become available on March 13, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.

About this ebook

‘Karen Russell is one in a million’ New York Times

From the Pulitzer shortlisted author, an astounding novel about magic, memory and land set America’s Dust Bowl.

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.

But after the great dust storm that flattens wheatfields, buries houses and kills a newlywed couple just a few feet from their car, the Antidote wakes up empty – as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever find out, her life will be in danger.

To the Antidote’s surprising defence come a farmer, his basketball-playing niece and a Black photographer with her time-travelling camera. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them to this lonely brink. Together, they face down the tornado coming their way.

The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting – theft, dispossession, wilful blindness, passed on generation to generation. The Dust Bowl echo with warnings of our own time, daring to challenge us with what might have been – and what still could be.

‘A brilliant writer with an amazing imagination’ The Times

About the author

Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Swamplandia! was a New York Times Top Ten Book and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and two National Magazine Awards for Fiction. She was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and selected for the New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter.

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