Karen Russell’s new novel, The Antidote, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2025
Karen Russell’s 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 novel 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.
The 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. This gripping Dust Bowl epic echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
It was sold, along with a story collection, again to Jordan Pavlin at Knopf, in a major deal, for publication in 2025, by Denise Shannon at Denise Shannon Literary Agency (NA). UK rights to Rose Tomaszewska at Chatto & Windus, by Judith Murray at Greene & Heaton, on behalf of Denise Shannon. Rights: cdee@deniseshannonagency.com