2025 National Book Award for Fiction (finalist)
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • WINNER OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town
NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Time, Esquire, PEN America, People, Scientific America, LitHub, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Globe and the Mail, Portland Monthly, Kirkus, BookPage
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 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.
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. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
Genre: Literary Fiction
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town
NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Time, Esquire, PEN America, People, Scientific America, LitHub, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Globe and the Mail, Portland Monthly, Kirkus, BookPage
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 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.
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. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"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
"In The Antidote, Karen Russell writes indelible characters who keep choosing messy community over silo'd righteousness, motion over despair. She presents for inspection America's most persistent chorus of moral self-defense, 'Better them than us,' and shows how it rots the minds, hearts, and land of all who sing it. 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
"Karen Russell runs her imaginative strings across dark caverns of our history so those spaces can sound their own songs. The Antidote lets us see the perils and possibilities of storytelling, illuminating its powers to erase, discover, reconstruct, prop up, terrorize, delight, and collapse. Russell is truly one of the greatest writers of our time. And then also: every page is pocked with joy, beauty, wildness and the perfect wisdom of mystery." - Rivka Galchen
"The Antidote is an achingly gorgeous book about dust, memory, basketball, murder, yearning, photography, and the way the land holds both the memory of what went before and the dreams of what may come. Karen Russell is one of our most humane and generous writers; this book is as profound as it is wonderfully strange." - Lauren Groff
"While, thankfully, there is no such thing as The Great American Novel (singular), there is a body of work by various novelists which reckon with our past - its mythologies, its myriad histories, its tragedies, its secret archives and its future possibilities. The Antidote is a remarkable addition to this communal, never-ending project. Karen Russell's novel is generous, profound, and will stay with me for a long time." - Kelly Link
"With The Antidote, 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 shakes from it a thing of exquisite beauty that is unlike anything you've ever read." - Dinaw Mengestu
"This novel swept me up and carried me away, even while somehow burying me, and digging up something about the story of this country I didn't know I needed to know. As with all of Russell's work, heaviness and levity are always kept in balance, and so I was lifted even while being devastated by the book's many brutal truths and stark beauty. I'd already considered Russell's vivid and inventive imagination to be endless, but here exploring a history of Nebraska we get an unearthing of this country's still relatively untold origin story, the part about its original people, and the cost paid in order that this country might be formed. Finishing the book I felt completely covered in the forgotten dust of what too few look back on, with rare clarity, not to mention the intricate braid of narratives masterfully woven here. The Antidote is one, for an all too poisoned American narrative about land and family and belonging." - Tommy Orange
"Russell's prose is something to be savored. Every sentence is meticulously crafted, each one revealing layers of meaning that draw you deeper into the narrative. 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. Memory is both the poison and the cure here, something that simultaneously traps and liberates the characters. They move through their world with the weight of what's unspoken pressing down on them. It's a novel that asks the reader to sit with discomfort, to walk alongside its characters as they confront their unresolved histories. Russell navigates these emotional landscapes with care and respect and the distinct gift she carries that is heaven - I mean Love." - Morgan Talty
"In The Antidote, Karen Russell writes indelible characters who keep choosing messy community over silo'd righteousness, motion over despair. She presents for inspection America's most persistent chorus of moral self-defense, 'Better them than us,' and shows how it rots the minds, hearts, and land of all who sing it. 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
"Karen Russell runs her imaginative strings across dark caverns of our history so those spaces can sound their own songs. The Antidote lets us see the perils and possibilities of storytelling, illuminating its powers to erase, discover, reconstruct, prop up, terrorize, delight, and collapse. Russell is truly one of the greatest writers of our time. And then also: every page is pocked with joy, beauty, wildness and the perfect wisdom of mystery." - Rivka Galchen
"The Antidote is an achingly gorgeous book about dust, memory, basketball, murder, yearning, photography, and the way the land holds both the memory of what went before and the dreams of what may come. Karen Russell is one of our most humane and generous writers; this book is as profound as it is wonderfully strange." - Lauren Groff
"While, thankfully, there is no such thing as The Great American Novel (singular), there is a body of work by various novelists which reckon with our past - its mythologies, its myriad histories, its tragedies, its secret archives and its future possibilities. The Antidote is a remarkable addition to this communal, never-ending project. Karen Russell's novel is generous, profound, and will stay with me for a long time." - Kelly Link
"With The Antidote, 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 shakes from it a thing of exquisite beauty that is unlike anything you've ever read." - Dinaw Mengestu
"This novel swept me up and carried me away, even while somehow burying me, and digging up something about the story of this country I didn't know I needed to know. As with all of Russell's work, heaviness and levity are always kept in balance, and so I was lifted even while being devastated by the book's many brutal truths and stark beauty. I'd already considered Russell's vivid and inventive imagination to be endless, but here exploring a history of Nebraska we get an unearthing of this country's still relatively untold origin story, the part about its original people, and the cost paid in order that this country might be formed. Finishing the book I felt completely covered in the forgotten dust of what too few look back on, with rare clarity, not to mention the intricate braid of narratives masterfully woven here. The Antidote is one, for an all too poisoned American narrative about land and family and belonging." - Tommy Orange
"Russell's prose is something to be savored. Every sentence is meticulously crafted, each one revealing layers of meaning that draw you deeper into the narrative. 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. Memory is both the poison and the cure here, something that simultaneously traps and liberates the characters. They move through their world with the weight of what's unspoken pressing down on them. It's a novel that asks the reader to sit with discomfort, to walk alongside its characters as they confront their unresolved histories. Russell navigates these emotional landscapes with care and respect and the distinct gift she carries that is heaven - I mean Love." - Morgan Talty
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Used availability for Karen Russell's The Antidote