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The Antidote

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( 8,010 ratings, 1,567 reviews)
Brief Description
An exceptional novel set in the 1930s Dust Bowl about magic, memory, and land; above all, a reckoning with America's wilfully forgotten history. 'A pure dust storm of utter genius' DAISY JOHNSON 'As profound as it is wonderfully strange' LAUREN GROFF 'Russell has rendered with soul... Read More
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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

An exceptional novel set in the 1930s Dust Bowl about magic, memory, and land; above all, a reckoning with America's wilfully forgotten history.

'A pure dust storm of utter genius' DAISY JOHNSON
'As profound as it is wonderfully strange' LAUREN GROFF
'Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude' KAVEH AKBAR

What do we choose to remember and what do we allow ourselves to forget?

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.

Until the Black Sunday storm, which flattens wheatfields, buries houses and vaporises every memory stored inside the Antidote. She wakes up empty - as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever discover the truth, her life will be in danger.

To the Antidote's surprising defence comes Asphodel - young tearaway, girls' basketball captain and aspiring prairie witch - who won't take no for an answer. Along with her Polish wheat-farmer uncle and a New Deal photographer with an enchanted camera, they must confront what has cursed this town: its land on the brink of ruin and its people on the edge of starvation. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them here. Together, they face down the storm coming their way.

The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation's forgetting - the wilful omissions passed down from generation to generation. This gripping Dust Bowl epic echoes with urgent warnings for our own time, daring us to imagine what might have been - and what still could be.

'Karen Russell is one in a million' New York Times
'This novel swept me up and carried me away' TOMMY ORANGE

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781784745646

Publisher: Vintage Publishing

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 13 March 2025

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Chatto & Windus

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 32.0mm

Width: 154.0mm

Height: 234.0mm

Weight: 520g

Pages: 432

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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