Karen Russell The Antidote

Annotation

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. But after the great dust storm that flattens wheatfields, buries houses and kills a newlywed couple just a few feet from their car, the Antidote wakes up empty - as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever find out, her life will be in danger. To the Antidote's surprising defence come a farmer, his basketball-playing niece and a Black photographer with her time-travelling camera. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them to this lonely brink. Together, they face down the tornado coming their way. The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation's forgetting - theft, dispossession, wilful blindness, passed on generation to generation. The Dust Bowl echo with warnings of our own time, daring to challenge us with what might have been - and what still could be.