
The Antidote
Karen Russell(Author)
Chatto & Windus (Publisher)
Published on 13. March 2025
Book
Hardback
432 pages
978-1-78474-563-9 (ISBN)
Description
***Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction***
'Powerful' Financial Times
'A pure dust storm of utter genius' DAISY JOHNSON
'As profound as it is wonderfully strange' LAUREN GROFF
What do we choose to remember and what do we allow ourselves to forget?
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 Polish wheat-farmer uncle 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.
'Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude' KAVEH AKBAR
'Karen Russell is one in a million' New York Times
'This novel swept me up and carried me away' TOMMY ORANGE
'Powerful' Financial Times
'A pure dust storm of utter genius' DAISY JOHNSON
'As profound as it is wonderfully strange' LAUREN GROFF
What do we choose to remember and what do we allow ourselves to forget?
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 Polish wheat-farmer uncle 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.
'Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude' KAVEH AKBAR
'Karen Russell is one in a million' New York Times
'This novel swept me up and carried me away' TOMMY ORANGE
Reviews / Votes
Powerful... weaves together a kind of rural American magic realism with passionate care for the natural world we're so busy destroying -- Erica Wagner * Financial Times * A brilliant writer with an amazing imagination * The Times * An elaborate embroidery of social, geological, historical, and environmental research on the impact of American Western expansion... [Russell's] sharp narrative grasp guides the reader from character to character as the book unfolds' * Los Angeles Times * Russell gets better and better with every word, she is a pure dust storm of utter genius -- DAISY JOHNSON, author of Everything Under Karen Russell is one of our most humane and generous writers; this book is as profound as it is wonderfully strange -- LAUREN GROFF, author of Matrix It's magic, a book doing this big work and also making it propulsive, eminently readable. Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude -- KAVEH AKBAR, author of Martyr! Russell's... potent prose and sheer originality consistently dazzle -- Hephzibah Anderson * Mail on Sunday * This novel swept me up and carried me away, even while somehow burying me, and digging up something about the story of [America] I didn't know I needed to know -- TOMMY ORANGE, author of Wandering Stars Brilliant. A vital exploration of America's truths and legacies, a novel for our times -- IRENOSEN OKOJIE Here in The Antidote, Karen Russel has summoned her singular brand of alchemy and created an epic of heart and devastation, community and laughter, death and life. A book that has it all. An absolute wonder -- NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars Karen Russell's novel is generous, profound, and will stay with me for a long time -- KELLY LINK, author of Get in Trouble Brilliant... [Russell] writes like nobody else on the planet -- TEA OBREHT, author of The Tiger's Wife A singular, haunting vision that fearlessly excavates the past and challenges the reader to face the future head-on. A storytelling tour de force * Kirkus (starred review) * Spellbinding... an inspired and unforgettable fusion of the gritty and the fantastic * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * Russell is truly one of the greatest writers of our time... every page is pocked with joy, beauty, wildness and the perfect wisdom of mystery -- RIVKA GALCHEN, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch Russell's prose is something to be savored... Her language is both lush and sharp, weaving a dreamlike quality into the story that makes the characters' emotional journeys feel all the more visceral. Russell navigates these emotional landscapes with care and respect and the distinct gift she carries that is heaven-I mean Love -- MORGAN TALTY, author of Fire Exit Karen Russell proves once again that there is no limit to her extraordinary imagination. She creates marvels out of what we imagine to be the ordinary world, she turns the historical novel upside down and shake from it a thing of exquisite beauty that is unlike anything you've ever read -- DINAW MENGESTU, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Russell has deep and true talent * San Francisco Chronicle *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Dimensions
Height: 237 mm
Width: 158 mm
Thickness: 42 mm
Weight
650 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78474-563-9 (9781784745639)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
03/2025
Vintage Digital
€12.99
Available for download

Person
Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Swamplandia! was a New York Times Top Ten Book and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Award, the 2023 Bottari Lattes Grinzane Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and two National Magazine Awards for Fiction. She was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists and selected for the New Yorker's 20 under 40 list. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, son, and daughter.