Antidote

The Antidote begins on Black Sunday, when a historic dust storm sweeps over Uz, a fictional town in Nebraska. Uz is already falling apart, weakened by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought and also by the violence buried in its own past.

The story follows a varied cast. The Prairie Witch holds other people's memories and secrets in her body, which works like a bank vault. A Polish wheat farmer finds out how fast a hoarded blessing can turn into a curse. His orphaned niece is a basketball star and the witch's apprentice, and she is running furiously from her grief. A talkative scarecrow also plays a part, as does a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera could expose both the town's secrets and its fate.

The novel is, above all, a reckoning with a nation's forgetting. It enacts the settler amnesia and deliberate omissions handed down from one generation to the next, and it digs up horrors as well as shimmering possibilities. It also carries urgent warnings for the present climate emergency, asking readers to consider what might have been and what still could be.

Karen Russell is also the author of Swamplandia!