The Mighty Red

A Novel

By: Louise Erdrich

Narrated by: Marin Ireland

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION

A Best Book of the Year: New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, Kirkus, Harper's Bazaar

""A novel set in a small prairie community. . . that somehow also captures the world."" — Parade

In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people’s lives.

In the Red River Valley of North Dakota, several lives revolve around a wedding fraught with desire, jealousy, and uncertainty. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed goth who can’t read her own future but will settle for fulfilling his. Her best friend, Hugo, a gentle, red-haired, homeschooled giant, also loves Kismet and is determined to steal her away and build a life together. Kismet’s mother, Crystal, drives a truck for Gary’s family, and on her nightly runs, tunes in to the darkness of late-night radio, experiences visions of guardian angels, and worries about what’s to come, for her daughter and herself.

The Mighty Red is Louise Erdrich at her consummate best. A novel of tender humor, disquietude, yearning, community, and family, it is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. Human time, deep time, Red River time, and geological time are explored alongside the impact of crises in our own time—climate change, the depletion of natural resources, the economic meltdown of 2008. It is a story about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

Amazing!

I grew up in the Red River Valley in the 50s I could so relate to this book. The smell of the sugar beet plant during harvest. We lived 15+ blocks away from the plant yet we would close our windows the smell was so horrible. The small planes flying over the fields spreading fertilizer. Later in life my mother getting breast cancer then much later my sister getting ovarian cancer, there was always talk about all the chemicals that were sprayed on the fields all around us, not knowing and wondering how much harm was being done to our bodies.

Beautiful Story

Louise Erdrich always has such a wonderful way with language, characters. A beautifully told story.

What a story

So good. Took me by surprise, the description was small compared to the scope of the book. I will definitely read more by this author. And listen to more by this reader, she was great.

The earth ain’t no joke

Again, Louise teases out a story with history, magic realism, love, tragedy, facts of life with both people and nature. And the greatest respect for each.

The life of teens growing up near the Red River.

Really about teenagers and their secrets. It wasn’t a fav of mine. Disliked the references to Catholic “