Description

Past and present combine in a contemporary tale of love and betrayal from Louise Erdrich, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 2012

‘Everything is all knotted up in a tangle. Pull one string of this family and the whole web will tremble.’

Rozin and Richard, living in Minneapolis with their two young daughters, seem a long way from the traditions of their Native American ancestors. But when one of their acquaintances kidnaps a strange and silent young woman from a Native American camp and brings her back to live with him as his wife, the connections they all hold to the past rear up to confront them. Soon the patterns of their ancestors begin to repeat themselves with truly tragic consequences.

No one is better placed than Louise Erdrich to chronicle the Native American experience. Shrouded in myth and steeped in imagery, this is also a tale of heartbreaking realism which manages to retain a warm and irrepressible humour and belief in the resilience of the human spirit.

Publisher Review

'A fiercely imagined tale of love and loss, a story that manages to transform tragedy into comic redemption, sorrow into heroic survival.' New York Times 'This is realism at its most magical, in a novel as satisfying as any Erdrich has written.' Kirkus 'Richly cadenced, deeply textured, Erdrich's writing has the lustre and sheen of poetry.' Los Angeles Times '[An] extraordinary new offering of history, lore, obsession, loss, and love. Beautifully, extravagantly, in narrative fragments that mix metaphor and story, Erdrich creates a seemingly haphazard, totally absorbing series of oblique snapshots of these characters.' San Francisco Chronicle