Published in 2025
412 pages
16 hours and 56 minutes
Karen Russell is the author of five books of fiction, including the NYT bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane prize, the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” prize and The New Yorker‘s “20 under 40” list (She is now decisively over 40). She has taught literature and creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California-Irvine, Williams College, Columbia University, and Bryn Mawr College, and was the Endowed Chair of Texas State’s MFA program. She serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile-library for people living outdoors. Born and raised in Miami, FL, she now lives in Portland, OR with her husband, son, and daughter.
What is this book about?
‘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
