Future Home of the Living God - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1472153359 ISBN 13: 9781472153357

Publisher: Harper & Row

Louise Erdrich, the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of LaRose and The Round House, paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event.The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar this change is profound and deeply personal: she is four months pregnant.Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby's origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity. There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe. A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers, a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time.

About the Author:

Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children's books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Review:

“Masterful...a breakout work of speculative fiction...Erdrich enters the realm of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale...A tornadic, suspenseful, profoundly provoking novel of life’s vulnerability and insistence...with a bold apocalyptic theme, searing social critique, and high-adrenaline action.” (Booklist, Starred Review)

“[A] startling new work of speculative fiction...strikingly relevant. Erdrich has written a cautionary tale for this very moment in time.” (Publishers Weekly, boxed review)

“A dazzling work of dystopian fiction a la Handmaid’s Tale.” (Real Simple)

“Propulsive, wry, and keenly observant...this chilling speculative fiction is perfect for readers seeking the next Handmaid’s Tale.” (Library Journal)

“[Erdrich] once again proves her talent for narrating a profound and compelling story.” (Ms. Magazine)

“Dreamlike, suspenseful...this novel is bracing, humane, dedicated to witnessing the plight of women in a cruel universe, and full of profound spiritual questions and observations. Like some of Erdrich’s earlier work, it shifts adroitly in time and has a thoughtful, almost mournful insight into life on a Native reservation...There is much to rue in this novel about our world but also hope for salvation.” (Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review)

• Publisher: Harper & Row
• ISBN 10: 1472153359
• ISBN 13: 9781472153357
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1