A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a notable event. She is a prolific and prize-winning author of novels, poetry and children’s books featuring Native American characters and themes. Her latest book follows the fates of families trying to eke out livings in the Red River Valley of North Dakota. In common with earlier works, the story explores themes of Erdrich’s Native American heritage, historical, ecological and social issues of the setting, and the fragmentation of families forging an ongoing battle with the elements.

In the grip of the 2008 financial meltdown, and grappling with environmental upheavals, the characters face crises of love gone wrong, threatened livelihoods, betrayal, divided loyalties and an initially unnamed tragedy that ruptured the small community.

Erdrich is masterful at vivid characterisation and her characters leap from the page. There’s Crystal, who hauls trucks for sugar beet farmers, feisty and fiercely protective of her daughter, Kismet, a troubled teenager who lets herself be persuaded into a doomed marriage with Gary, the feckless local football hero, when she’s really in love with bookish Hugo. Complicating matters, Kismet’s father absconds with the town’s church renovation fund, bringing disgrace on his family, Gary’s troubled mother, Winnie, who, believing Kismet can exert a transformative influence over her son, keeps her a domestic slave to the household, and a mysterious and untraceable bank robber roams the district committing ever more outlandish crimes.

An unforgettable story, rich with suspense, humour and pathos and consummately rendered against a haunting and unforgiving landscape.

Reviewed by Anne Green

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of contemporary Native American novelists. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, she grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She worked at various jobs, such as hoeing sugar beets, farm work, waitressing, short order cooking, lifeguarding, and construction work, before becoming a writer.

The Antelope Wife was published in 1998, not long after her separation from her partner and his subsequent suicide. Some reviewers believed they saw in The Antelope Wife the anguish Erdrich must have felt as her marriage crumbled, but she has stated that she is unconscious of having mirrored any real-life events.

She is the author of four previous bestselling and award-winning novels, including Love Medicine; The Beet Queen; Tracks; and The Bingo Palace. She also has written two collections of poetry, Jacklight, and Baptism of Desire. Her fiction has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle (1984) and The Los Angeles Times (1985), and has been translated into fourteen languages.

Several of her short stories have been selected for O. Henry awards and for inclusion in the annual Best American Short Story anthologies. The Blue Jay’s Dance, a memoir of motherhood, was her first nonfiction work, and her children’s book, Grandmother’s Pigeon, has been published by Hyperion Press. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore called The Birchbark.