The Antidote

‘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