The Antidote

Brought to you by Penguin.

***Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction***

What do we choose to remember and what do we allow ourselves to forget?

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.

Until the Black Sunday storm, which flattens wheatfields, buries houses and vaporizes every memory stored inside the Antidote. She wakes up empty – as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever discover the truth, her life will be in danger.

To the Antidote’s surprising defence comes Asphodel – young tearaway, girls’ basketball captain and aspiring prairie witch – who won’t take no for an answer. Along with her Polish wheat-farmer uncle and a New Deal photographer with an enchanted camera, they must confront what has cursed this town: its land on the brink of ruin and its people on the edge of starvation. Apart, they run from the memories that have brought them here. Together, they face down the storm coming their way.

The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting – the wilful omissions passed down from generation to generation. This gripping Dust Bowl epic echoes with urgent warnings for our own time, daring us to imagine what might have been – and what still could be.

'Powerful' Financial Times
'A pure dust storm of utter genius' DAISY JOHNSON
‘As profound as it is wonderfully strange’ LAUREN GROFF

© Karen Russell 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025