2025 National Book Award for Fiction (finalist)
***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
Genre: Literary 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
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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