NATIONAL BESTSELLER • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • 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 A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from Lit Hub, Marie Claire, TIME, Vulture, Esquire, People, The Chicago Review of Books, and BookPage 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 readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.

The Antidote is really a shame. NUBClub generally agreed that Russell had a really good core idea to this novel - she creates the idea of a prairie witch who takes memories people don't want and then leaves them with sanitized versions of history and uses that as a metaphor for the way oppression and exploitation are erased from history. The story follows the small town the prairie witch lives in as a series of catastrophic weather events (which actually happened in the real world) strike the town and shake its established relationships and corruptions. Russell does this with some very good writing in places, capturing a complex and believable small town ecosystem of striving, coping, and poverty. A long scene involving the teens of town traveling to compete in a basketball championship is the apex of the novel and should be read independently as a fascinating study of hope and limited perspective. With such a strong core concept and such good execution in places, we really wanted The Antidote to be great. Unfortunately, the book fell down in a couple of places in ways some of us could forgive and others of us couldn't. We disagreed about how good Russell's worldbuilding was: some of us had major issues with the way the supernatural seemed to follow no rules and just do whatever the author needed, mostly notably in the way the scarecrow operated in the story. But everyone was disappointed by the book's conclusion. Russell is so committed to her theme that one of the characters undergoes a profoundly ahistoric and unbelievable revelation about his history and guilt in it and as that launches the lack act of the work, everything that followed was poisoned by that false step. Overall, NUBClub is torn in our recommendation of this work. It's not in any way bad and there are some truly terrific moments, but your mileage will vary based on how much the things that don't work hurt the entire work.