The Antidote

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

***Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction***

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.

'Powerful' Financial Times
'A pure dust storm of utter genius' DAISY JOHNSON
‘As profound as it is wonderfully strange’ LAUREN GROFF

© Karen Russell 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

Powerful... weaves together a kind of rural American magic realism with passionate care for the natural world we’re so busy destroying
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
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

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