The Antidote: A Novel

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FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • WINNER OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD

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 New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Time, Esquire, PEN America, People, Scientific America, LitHub, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Globe and the Mail, Portland Monthly, 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.

From the Publisher

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 11, 2025
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 059380225X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593802250
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.55 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #8,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #8 in Metaphysical & Visionary Fiction (Books) #108 in 20th Century Historical Fiction (Books) #183 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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