The Antidote

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • 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 WASHINGTON POST, NPR, 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.
===
Aurian and Jin Koch are trying, very hard, to be peaceful. They're doing a terrible job. Owning a shiny new Inn in a boring Gold Road village might be Aurian's dream, but the world has other ideas. When Aurian and Jin Koch leave Morda Bonemaker's funeral procession to attempt a peaceful life, they underestimate how difficult their singular history of violence and mayhem will make getting along with the neighbors. Will their history follow them, even into retirement? For that matter--is Evinanjin Koch, veteran hero, capable of retirement? An Aurian and Jin novelette--NOT the second book in the Sundering Trilogy.