The Antidote

A Novel

By: Karen Russell

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

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

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!