New Releases by Louise Erdrich

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION A Best Book of the Year: New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, Kirkus, Harper''s Bazaar "A novel set in a small prairie community. . . that somehow also captures the world." — Parade In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people’s lives. In the Red River Valley of North Dakota, several lives revolve around a wedding fraught with desire, jealousy, and uncertainty. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed goth who can’t read her own future but will settle for fulfilling his. Her best friend, Hugo, a gentle, red-haired, homeschooled giant, also loves Kismet and is determined to steal her away and build a life together. Kismet’s mother, Crystal, drives a truck for Gary’s family, and on her nightly runs, tunes in to the darkness of late-night radio, experiences visions of guardian angels, and worries about what’s to come, for her daughter and herself. The Mighty Red is Louise Erdrich at her consummate best. A novel of tender humor, disquietude, yearning, community, and family, it is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. Human time, deep time, Red River time, and geological time are explored alongside the impact of crises in our own time—climate change, the depletion of natural resources, the economic meltdown of 2008. It is a story about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

“Romantic love, religious ecstasy, the strange mixture of devotion and misunderstanding that runs through families—all are steeped together. The result is a rich and fragrant infusion. . . . [Written] with great poignancy and charm.” — New York Times Book Review A darkly humorous novel of wild romance and heartbreak set against a raging North Dakota blizzard as five Native American women bond over their shared connection to one man, from award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich Five very different women have married Jack Mauser, a charming, infuriating schemer whose passions never survive the long haul. Now, stranded in a North Dakota blizzard, they have come face-to-face—and each has an astonishing story to tell. Huddling for warmth, they pass the endless night by remembering the stories of how each came to love, marry, and ultimately move beyond Jack. At times painful, at times heartbreaking, and oftentimes comic, their tales become the adhesive that holds them together—in their love for Jack and in their lives as women. With her characteristic powers of observation and luminescent prose, Louise Erdrich brings these women''s unforgettable tales to life in a tour de force from one of the most formidable American writers at work today. This edition of Tales of Burning Love includes a P.S. section with additional insights from the author, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

A fresh new look for this National Book Award finalist by Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Louise Erdrich! This is the first installment in an essential nine-book series chronicling one hundred years in the life of one Ojibwe family and includes charming interior black-and-white artwork done by the author. She was named Omakakiins, or Little Frog, because her first step was a hop. Omakakiins and her family live on an island in Lake Superior. Though there are growing numbers of white people encroaching on their land, life continues much as it always has. But the satisfying rhythms of their life are shattered when a visitor comes to their lodge one winter night, bringing with him an invisible enemy that will change things forever—but that will eventually lead Omakakiins to discover her calling. By turns moving and humorous, this novel is a breathtaking tour de force by a gifted writer. The beloved and celebrated Birchbark House series by Louise Erdrich includes The Birchbark House, The Game of Silence, The Porcupine Year, Chickadee, and Makoons, with more titles to come.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN''S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022 PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE NIGHT WATCHMAN ----------------------------------------------------- In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman''s relentless errors. Louise Erdrich''s latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store''s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls'' Day, but she simply won''t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading ''with murderous attention,'' must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation and furious reckoning. The Sentence begins on All Souls'' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls'' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written. ------------------------------------ ''Erdrich is one of the greatest living American writers'' Guardian ''Strange, enchanting and funny: a work about motherhood, doom, regret and the magic - dark, benevolent and every shade in between - of words on paper'' New York Times ''The poet laureate of the contemporary Native American experience'' Mail on Sunday

The American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman in this “forceful, beautifully written” (Associated Press) collection that brings together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays “full of struggle, emotion, fear, resilience, hope, and triumph” (Los Angeles Review of Books) about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

"Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new 'emancipation; bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn't about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a 'termination; that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans 'for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run? Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice's shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn't been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life. Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice's best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice." --

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WASHINGTON POST, NPR, CBS SUNDAY MORNING, KIRKUS, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman. Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”? Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life. Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice. In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.

The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself as women have begun giving birth to babies that appear to be a primitive species of human. When rumors start of Congress rounding up and confining pregnant women, Cedar Hawk Songmaker will do anything to keep herself and her unborn 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.

When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 14-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.

In this award-winning sequel to Chickadee, acclaimed author Louise Erdrich continues her celebrated Birchbark House series with the story of an Ojibwe family in nineteenth-century America. Named for the Ojibwe word for little bear, Makoons and his twin, Chickadee, have traveled with their family to the Great Plains of Dakota Territory. There they must learn to become buffalo hunters and once again help their people make a home in a new land. But Makoons has had a vision that foretells great challenges—challenges that his family may not be able to overcome. Based on Louise Erdrich’s own family history, this fifth book in the series features black-and-white interior illustrations, a note from the author about her research, and a map and glossary of Ojibwe terms.

For more than three decades, bestselling author Louise Erdrich has enthralled readers with dazzling novels that paint an evocative portrait of Native American life. From her dazzling first novel, Love Medicine, to the National Book Award-winning The Round House, Erdrich’s lyrical skill and emotional assurance have earned her a place alongside William Faulkner and Willa Cather as an author deeply rooted in the American landscape. In Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, Erdrich takes us on an illuminating tour through the terrain her ancestors have inhabited for centuries: the lakes and islands of southern Ontario. Summoning to life the Ojibwe's sacred spirits and songs, their language and sorrows, she considers the many ways in which her tribe—whose name derives from the word ozhibii'ige, "to write"—have influenced her. Her journey links ancient stone paintings with a magical island where a bookish recluse built an extraordinary library, and she reveals how both have transformed her. A blend of history, mythology, and memoir, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country is an enchanting meditation on modern life, natural splendor, and the ancient spirituality and creativity of Erdrich's native homeland—a long, elemental tradition of storytelling that is in her blood.

Winner of the National Book Award • Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book From one of the most revered novelists of our time, an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family. One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface because Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe''s life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared. While his father, a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning. The Round House is a page-turning masterpiece—at once a powerful coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a tender, moving novel of family, history, and culture.

Continuing the series that began with The Birchbark House, The Game of Silence and The Porcupine Year, Chickadee follows a brand new character, Omakayas's grandson Chickadee. It's 1866 and just like the bird that is his namesake, Chickadee is small and clever. When Chickadee's twin brother pranks Shigaag, the tribe's ne'er-do-well, Shigaag's unruly, bumbling sons kidnap Chickadee as revenge. He's taken farther from home than he's ever been. But Chickadee is not afraid because he remembers the saying his grandmother taught him: small things have great power. To find his way back to his home and his family, Chickadee must make a daring escape, forge unlikely friendships and set out on the most exciting and dangerous journey he's ever taken. This story of Chickadee and his family is based on Louise Erdrich's own family history.

Omakayas was a dreamer who did not yet know her limits. When Omakayas is twelve winters old, she and her family set off on a harrowing journey in search of a new home. Pushed to the brink of survival, Omakayas continues to learn from the land and the spirits around her, and she discovers that no matter where she is, or how she is living, she has the one thing she needs to carry her through.

Louise Erdrich's first major work of nonfiction, The Blue Jay's Dance, brilliantly and poignantly examines the joys and frustrations, the compromises and the insights, and the difficult struggles and profound emotional satisfactions the acclaimed author experienced in the course of one twelve–month period—from a winter pregnancy through a spring and summer of new motherhood to her return to writing in the fall. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Erdrich illuminates afresh the large and small events that every parent will recognize and appreciate.

This novel presents the story of Irene America, who is a smart, beautiful, introspective woman of Native American descent. Too distracted to finish her doctoral degree, she musters the emotional resources needed to keep two journals. The "Red Diary" is bait, filled with adulterous scenes that Irene uses to push volatile artist husband Gil close enough to the brink that he'll leave her. She unleashes all her rage and frustration in the "Blue Notebook," which she keeps in a bank deposit box. Meanwhile, Gil believes that his obsessive graphic paintings of Irene will somehow lure her back to him. Caught in the crosshairs of their parents' cruel, messy unraveling are 13-year-old Florian, a genius who models his mother's excessive drinking habits; Riel, 11, who believes that only she can hold her disintegrating family together; and sunny little Stoney. The result is a cautionary tale of the shocking havoc that willfully destructive, self-centered spouses wreak not only upon themselves but also upon their children.

“These molten poems radiate with the ferocity of desire, and in them Erdrich does not spin verse so much as tell tales—of betrayal and revenge, of hunting and being hunted.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune A passionate book of poetry from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich. In this important collection, Erdrich has selected the best poems from her two previous books of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, and added 19 new poems. In an entirely unique fashion, Original Fire unfolds the themes and introduces the characters of some of Erdrich’s most acclaimed fiction. The beloved storyteller Nanapush, most recently seen in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, appears in these poems as the questing rascal Potchikoo. And a series of poems called “The Butcher’s Wife”—dating from 1984—contains, in embryo, the story of her novel, The Master Butchers Singing Club.

From National Book Award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author Louise Erdrich, a profound and enchanting new novel: a richly imagined world “where butchers sing like angels.” Having survived World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend, killed in action. With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher''s precious knife set, Fidelis sets out for America. In Argus, North Dakota, he builds a business, a home for his family—which includes Eva and four sons—and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town. When the Old World meets the New—in the person of Delphine Watzka—the great adventure of Fidelis''s life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted. She meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine''s life, and the trajectory of this brilliant novel.

Couronné par le National Book Critics Circle Award, ce livre a imposé la voix singulière d’une romancière aujourd’hui reconnue et saluée comme un écrivain majeur. De 1934 à nos jours, Love Medicine retrace les destins entrelacés de deux familles indiennes, isolées sur leur réserve du Dakota, à qui les Blancs ont volé non seulement leur terre mais ont aussi tenté de voler leur âme. Mêlant comédie et tragédie, puisant aux sources d’un univers imaginaire riche et poétique qui marque tous ses livres, de Derniers rapports à Little No Horse à Ce qui a dévoré nos cœurs, ce premier roman de Louise Erdrich est présenté ici dans sa version définitive, reprise et augmentée par l’auteur. « Un livre d’une telle beauté qu’on en oublierait presque qu’il nous brise le cœur. » Toni Morrison, Prix Nobel de Littérature « Ses livres ont imposé Louise Erdrich comme l’une des grandes voix de la littérature américaine, mais elle est l’une des rares à construire un édifice romanesque d’une complexité comparable à celle de Faulkner. » Le Point

When a woman named Faye Travers is called upon to appraise the estate of a family in her small New Hampshire town, she isn''t surprised to discover a forgotten cache of valuable Native American artifacts. After all, the family descends from an Indian agent who worked on the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that is home to her mother''s family. However, she stops dead in her tracks when she finds in the collection a rare drum -- a powerful yet delicate object, made from a massive moose skin stretched across a hollow of cedar, ornamented with symbols she doesn''t recognize and dressed in red tassels and a beaded belt and skirt -- especially since, without touching the instrument, she hears it sound. From Faye''s discovery, we trace the drum''s passage both backward and forward in time, from the reservation on the northern plains to New Hampshire and back. Through the voice of Bernard Shaawano, an Ojibwe, we hear how his grandfather fashioned the drum after years of mourning his young daughter''s death, and how it changes the lives of those whose paths its crosses. And through Faye we hear of her anguished relationship with a local sculptor, who himself mourns the loss of a daughter, and of the life she has made alone with her mother, in the shadow of the death of Faye''s sister. Through these compelling voices, The Painted Drum explores the strange power that lost children exert on the memories of those they leave behind, and as the novel unfolds, its elegantly crafted narrative comes to embody the intricate, transformative rhythms of human grief. One finds throughout the grace and wit, the captivating prose and surprising beauty, that characterize Louise Erdrich''s finest work.

Her name is Omakayas, or Little Frog, because her first step was a hop, and she lives on an island in Lake Superior.It is 1850, and the lives of the Ojibwe have returned to a familiar rhythm: they build their birchbark houses in the summer, go to the ricing camps in the fall to harvest and feast, and move to their cozy cedar log cabins near the town of LaPointe before the first snows. The satisfying routines of Omakayas''s days are interrupted by a surprise visit from a group of desperate and mysterious people. From them, she learns that all their lives may drastically change. The chimookomanag, or white people, want Omakayas and her people to leave their island in Lake Superior and move farther west. Omakayas realizes that something so valuable, so important that she never knew she had it in the first place, is in danger: Her home. Her way of life. In this captivating sequel to National Book Award nominee The Birchbark House, Louise Erdrich continues the story of Omakayas and her family.

A powerful new novel of from one of America's most important and entertaining writers In 1918, Fidelis walks home from the Great War to a Germany broken and defeated. He finds himself inexplicably drawn to the fiancee of his dead best friend and they marry but, knowing he cannot make his fortune here, Fidelis heads for America. When he leaves, 'The inside pockets of his father's suit held all he needed.' He leaves behind his family of master butchers, but not the skills he has learned from them and in America his sausages gradually become legendary... Moving to small-town America, he is soon joined by his wife and son, opens a deli and life seems to be perfect. But there are always the locals to contend with and when they meet Delphine and Cyprian, two eccentric travelling circus performers, things begin to get interesting. There is the problem of the unresolved dead bodies discovered rotting in the basement of Delphine's father's house, for one. And then there is the rivalry over the local singing groups -- will Fidelis be able to prove his superiority? Spanning two continents, this epic look at post-war immigrants' America is Louise Erdrich at her engrossing best. Warm, human, fu

Beautiful reissue of Louise Erdrich''s most famous novel, from one of the most celebrated American writers of her generation and winner of the National Book Award 2012.

Being of mixed blood and having lived in both white and Indian worlds, they give an original perspective on American society. Sometimes with humor and always with refreshing candor, their discussions undermine the damaging stereotypes of American Indians. Some of the interviews focus on their nonfiction book The Broken Cord, which recounts the struggle to solve their adopted son's health problems from fetal alcohol syndrome. Included also are two recent interviews published here for the first time.

Presents a collection of stories selected from magazines in the United States and Canada

Set in the early 1900s, Tracks follows a North Dakota Indian tribe and its struggle to keep their land out of the hands of an encroaching white society.