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 in 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.

Until the Black Sunday storm, which flattens wheatfields, buries houses and vaporizes 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 uncle, a Polish wheat farmer, 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.

'This novel swept me up and carried me away, even while somehow burying me, and digging up something about the story of this country I didn’t know I needed to know' Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

‘Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude’ Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!