The Antidote

A Novel

De: Karen Russell

Narrado por: Elena Rey, Sophie Amoss, Mark Bramhall, Shayna Small, Jon Orsini, Natasha Soudek, Karen Russell, James Riding In

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 Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"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

Karen Russell writes books like Nobody’s business. Period.

I don’t need Any convincing, I’m running Directly to Amazon to buy All of Karen Russell’s books on my Kindle!

Annoying irritating performance

Very annoying reading that ruined the story. I got so tired of hearing the lady who read this story, with her overdramatization and over breathy vocalization trying to lower her voice for every male character, making them all sound lazy and annoying. Her trying to make child voices was equally annoying. Totally ruined the entire story. Not sure how anyone could listen to this and pay attention to the story instead of how badly the voices were done. What a disappointment waiting years for the new Karen Russel novel only to not be able to stand it for five minutes.

the dustbowl

enjoyed learning exploring the legendary Dustbowl in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma as well as the Indigenous people involved, effected and affected. I knew about the Industrial school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This novel explored the Pawnee experience

1935 Nebraska Dustbowl drama with a Supernatural twist.

Set in the 1935 in the historical period when a real life dust storms drove many families to abandon their family farms. The farms were homesteaded by their immigrant grandparents on Pawnee Indian land which was a betrayal of a Pawnee Treaty with the US. Loss of physical soil leading to loss of community relationships challenge the characters to find a way persevere.
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.

Excellent in every way

I am in awe of this book. Read it. Somehow manages to be entertaining and deep at the same time. Great characters, great story, great writing.

Lacks focus

What was at the core of this book one might wonder after almost 17 hours of listening ... Is it the history of the dust bowl, is it the plight of native Americans, feminism, how unwed mothers were treated in the 1800's, corrupt politicians, a yearning mother, a black female photographer trying to make a name for herself, an orphan who may be a lesbian and who loves basketball or perhaps a magical witch who gets to help the town bury their unwanted memories? Yes, friends it's all those things and probably some I have forgotten.

This is not a spoiler, at the end of the book we get sort of an afterward read by a Native American man giving some context to their history during that time, so I'm guessing that was supposed to be the main thrust of the story, but honestly - it missed the mark if it was.

It was a frustrating book to consume - I never connected with any of the characters, honestly didn't care what happened, and there were parts of the story which never came together in the end - how could they? All that being said, there was a level of creativity in the book that I really appreciated and it did keep moving enough to keep me going. But in the end, the payoff wasn't worth the investment.

That is never got better

So breathy and overrated Elena ray practically whines every word. Torture. Listen at your own risk

So disappointed

I was so excited that Karen Russell had a new novel, I was expecting to love this one. Sadly, I did not. Swamplandia was one of those books that used metaphor just right, had a sense of magic in just the right amount, and had a real sense of place. This book uses magic as a blunt instrument to bash a message across. No nuance, just bashing. The story seemed to be written around wanting to make a grand message. Also, there were too many sub plots that were all message-y too, the only unified message is that white men are bad, and want to forget about it. Toward the end, I began to think I wandered into a YA novel. The narrator for the young girl and the witch was hard to listen to, one of the narrators that always talks in an intense frantic tone. The other narrators were actually wonderful.