The Antidote

A Novel

De: Karen Russell

Narrado por: Elena Rey, Sophie Amoss, Mark Bramhall, Shayna Small, Jon Orsini, Natasha Soudek, Karen Russell, James Riding In

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • WINNER OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD

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

NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Time, Esquire, PEN America, People, Scientific America, LitHub, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Globe and the Mail, Portland Monthly, Kirkus, BookPage

The 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.

the dustbowl

enjoyed learning exploring the legendary Dustbowl in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma as well as the Indigenous people involved, effected and affected. I knew about the Industrial school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This novel explored the Pawnee experience

Excellent exposition of characters. The landscape included and the sensitive retelling of a painful period in American history.

Sensitive weaving of fact and fiction. The magical and the brutal reality of the connections to today’s environmental threats.

Superb, multi-layered story with a talented cast of narrators

It’s all there in my title. This is literature, to be not only enjoyed but taught.

Beautiful descriptive writing.

This novel is beautifully written. Just enjoy the magical realism and don’t worry about everything making sense. I highly recommend reading the author’s notes.

Karen Russell writes books like Nobody’s business. Period.

I don’t need Any convincing, I’m running Directly to Amazon to buy All of Karen Russell’s books on my Kindle!