
The Antidote
A Novel
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $22.50
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
By:
-
Karen Russell
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • 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
A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from Lit Hub, Marie Claire, TIME, Vulture, Esquire, People, The Chicago Review of Books, and 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 listeners with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
©2025 Karen Russell (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"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. Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude."—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
“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, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
“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, author of The Vaster Wilds
People who viewed this also viewed...


















the dustbowl
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It comes together powerfully in the end and has plenty of exciting twists along the way to keep you enticed. My only concerns were some unfinished storylines with Harp and Etna, the deputy, Del and Valeria, as well as the awkwardness of The prairie witch apparently talking to her son in diary form which was confusing at times and felt disjointed.
Nonetheless it is a masterful work of art that speaks critically to so many truths our modern American culture needs to hear.
A Panoply of Justice issues woven into a creative story
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Superb, multi-layered story with a talented cast of narrators
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Karen Russell writes books like Nobody’s business. Period.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Excellent
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Ambitious book and great storytelling
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
magical and history
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Annoying irritating performance
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is a stunning book
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The story is complex with many characters who are living with loss of significant relationships, ways of life, memories of what was. Still others find a way to dispel painful memories and feel the better for it. There is a lot of soul searching.
Supernatural elements play into the story and they keep the reader guessing about the outcome. It is a long book. I enjoyed listening to it over several days.
1935 Nebraska Dustbowl drama with a Supernatural twist.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.