The book cover for The Antidote, a novel by Karen Russell.

Only Karen Russell could write a dust bowl opus with such raucous brio—The Antidote soars with exigent joy and laugh-out-loud scenes, with memory witches and enchanted cameras and the world’s most lovable sentient scarecrow. It’s magic, a book doing this big work and also making it propulsive, eminently readable. If irony bypasses the difficulty of describing things, then the vivid sincerity on display here marks a virtuosic artist at the height of her lucidity. Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude.  

-Kaveh Akbar
Author of Martyr!

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE, AND TEATIME BOOK CLUB SELECTION

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 niece, player-captain of a feral basketball team and apprentice prairie witch; 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.

Praise for The Antidote

“A singular, haunting vision that fearlessly excavates the past and challenges the reader to face the future head-on. A storytelling tour de force that lives up to the promise of its name.” —Kirkus, starred review

“The spellbinding latest from Russell…an inspired and unforgettable fusion of the gritty and the fantastic.” —Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

“Highly honored Russell follows two stellar story collections with her second novel, an ardent work of encompassing and compassionate historical fiction supercharged with her signature imaginative, astutely calibrated supernatural twists. A dramatic and uncanny tale of the drastic consequences of the destruction of nature and Indigenous communities.”—Booklist, starred review

Consistently true of award-winning Russell’s (Orange World and Other Stories) work, The Antidote is wholly original, exploring memory, climate politics, and intergenerational trauma from unexpected angles. With moments of deep excavation of murder and injustice, especially against Indigenous populations, the book is, on the one hand, a carefully composed elegy of loss. Simultaneously, it’s a story of hope, with a through line that shifts the focus and changes the lens from forgetting to hope, with shimmering yet focused imagery.” —Library Journal, starred review

“The Antidote blends speculative and fantasy elements with rich language and vivid characters in an effort not to escape reality but to comment even more thoughtfully on it. . . . Russell’s lyrical writing dazzles on every page.” —The New York Times

“Spellbinding. . . . In The Antidote, Karen Russell, America's own Prairie Witch of a writer, exhumes memories out of the collective national unconscious and invites us to see our history in full. There are, alas, no antidotes for history. Our consolations are found in writers like Russell who refract horror and wonder through their own strange looking glass, leaving us energized for that next astounding thing.” —NPR

“To embark on the adventure of reading The Antidote is to place yourself under the enchanting and challenging care of a writer who is guilty of actual witchcraft.” —The Washington Post

“As in the best of her short stories, Russell creates a rich, grounded world that uses the supernatural as a means to explore the depths of her characters’ emotions—loss, loneliness, longing, and even hope—and reach a transcendent, lyrical honesty.”
—Vulture

Anticipation for The Antidote