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.

Thomas e Patrice vivem na empobrecida comunidade da reserva junto com o jovem boxeador Chippewa, Wood Mountain, e sua mãe, Juggie Blue, sua sobrinha e melhor amiga de Patrice, Valentine, e Cabelo de Palha Barnes, professor de matemática do ensino médio e treinador de boxe irremediavelmente apaixonado por Patrice. Thomas Wazhashk é vigilante noturno da fábrica de rolamento de joias, a primeira fábrica localizada próximo da Reserva de Turtle Mountain na zona rural da Dakota do Norte. Ele também é membro do Conselho Chippewa, que está tentando compreender as consequências do novo projeto de lei de "emancipação" que está seguindo para o Congresso dos Estados Unidos. O ano é 1953, e ele e outros membros do conselho sabem que o projeto de lei não se trata de liberdade. O Congresso está farto dos indígenas. O projeto de lei é uma "terminação" que ameaça os direitos, as terras e a identidade dos povos originários dos Estados Unidos. Como pode o governo abandonar os tratados feitos de boa-fé com os povos pelo "tempo que a grama crescer e as águas dos rios fluírem"? Desde que se graduou no ensino médio, Pixie Paranteau insiste que todos a chamem de Patrice. Diferentemente da maioria das garotas da reserva, Patrice, a oradora da turma, não tem o menor desejo em acabar com um marido e filhos. Ela monta rolamentos de joias na fábrica, um trabalho que mal paga o suficiente para ela sustentar a mãe e o irmão. O... ...vergonhoso pai alcoólatra de Patrice retorna para casa esporadicamente para aterrorizar a esposa e os filhos e ainda a intimida por causa de dinheiro. Mas Patrice precisa de cada centavo que tem para procurar sua amada irmã mais velha, Vera, que se mudou para a grande cidade de Mineápolis. Vera pode ter desaparecido, não faz contato com eles há meses e há rumores de que ela tenha tido um bebê. Determinada a encontrar Vera e seu filho, Patrice faz uma viagem fatídica para Minnesota que a leva a formas inesperadas de exploração e violência, e que põem sua vida em perigo.

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.

“Gripping. . . a hushed and haunting tale.” — USA Today A stunning tour-de-force from award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich. Shadow Tag fearlessly explores the complex nature of love, the fluid boundaries of identity, and the anatomy of one family’s struggle for survival and redemption. When Irene America discovers that her artist husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed securely in a safe-deposit box. There she records the truth about her life and marriage, while turning her Red Diary—hidden where Gil will find it—into a manipulative charade. As Irene and Gil fight to keep up appearances for their three children, their home becomes a place of increasing violence and secrecy. And Irene drifts into alcoholism, moving ever closer to the ultimate destruction of a relationship filled with shadowy need and strange ironies.

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.

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.

Dans l’œuvre de Louise Erdrich, le rêve peut surgir du quotidien, le comique tourner au tragique, la violence et la beauté envahir tout à coup un paysage banal. Rassemblées pour la première fois en deux volumes (La décapotable rouge et Femme nue jouant Chopin), ces nouvelles publiées dans des revues littéraires et des magazines américains sont marquées par l’imaginaire sensuel et fertile d’un écrivain singulier. On y retrouve la genèse de ce qui a constitué, au fil des livres, l’univers de Louise Erdrich, de Love Medicine à Dans le silence du vent, couronné par le National Book Award : le Dakota du Nord, le monde indien, un réalisme à la fois magique et poétique, la passion secrète qui habite ses personnages et la puissance d’évocation de ses histoires. « L’un de nos plus grands écrivains, remarquable par son audace stylistique et sa virtuosité artistique. Ce livre est une splendide démonstration de son talent et de son style. » The Washington Post

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.

“È il suo capolavoro” Philip Roth L’ambiente è quello descritto così bene da Louise Erdrich ne La casa tonda e nei suoi romanzi precedenti: le riserve indiane degli stati settentrionali americani, quelli al confine con il Canada. Il North Dakota. Qui il romanzo si apre, all’inizio del Novecento, con la breve descrizione di una strage. Una famiglia viene sterminata: sopravvive, aggrappata alle sbarre del suo lettino, solo una bambina. Questo delitto – mai risolto nel corso del tempo – è soltanto la prima di una lunga serie di vicende, drammatiche e comiche in giusta misura, che ci vengono raccontate di volta in volta da Evelina Harp, controfigura dell’autrice, dal nonno, il vecchissimo Mooshum, grande affabulatore di aneddoti e tall stories nella antica tradizione pellerossa, e dal giudice Antone Bazil Coutts, un sanguemisto che dopo aver diretto per anni un cimitero occupa lo scranno di magistrato, ed è delegato a dirimere le piccole controversie locali secondo le leggi tribali in vigore. Un libro emozionante come pochi altri.

Gil est peintre, Irène écrivain. Ils ont trois enfants. Irene a souvent servi de modèle à son mari. Trop souvent, sans doute. Irene tient son journal intime dans un agenda rouge. Lorsqu''elle découvre que Gil le lit, elle décide d''en rédiger un autre, un carnet bleu qu''elle met en lieu sûr et dans lequel elle livre sa vérité. Elle continue néanmoins à écrire dans l''agenda rouge, qui lui sert à manipuler son unique lecteur. Une guerre psychologique commence. En faisant alterner les journaux d''Irene et un récit à la troisième personne, Louise Erdrich témoigne, une fois de plus, d''une prodigieuse maîtrise narrative.

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.

L''homme répara le fusil et la balle glissa en douceur dans la chambre. Il l''essaya plusieurs fois, puis se leva et se tint au-dessus du berceau... L''homme épaula le fusil. Autour de lui, dans la pièce close, l''odeur du sang frais montait de toutes parts. L. E. Depuis toujours, la petite ville de Pluto, Dakota du Nord, vit sous «la malédiction des colombes», qui dévorent ses maigres récoltes comme le passé dévore le présent. Nous sommes en 1966 et le souvenir de quatre innocents lynchés cinquante ans auparavant hante toujours les esprits. En écoutant les récits de son grand-père indien qui fut témoin du drame, Evelina, une adolescente insouciante, prend soudainement conscience de la réalité...Un chef-d’œuvre éblouissant. Philip Roth .Une vraie prouesse littéraire et sa saga polyphonique n’est pas sans rappeler l’œuvre d’un Faulkner. Marie Debals, L’Hebdo.

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.

“Haunted and haunting. . . . With fearlessness and humility, in a narrative that flows more artfully than ever between destruction and rebirth, Erdrich has opened herself to possibilities beyond what we merely see—to the dead alive and busy, to the breath of trees and the souls of wolves—and inspires readers to open their hearts to these mysteries as well.”— Washington Post Book World From the author of the National Book Award Winner The Round House, Louise Erdrich''s breathtaking, lyrical novel of a priceless Ojibwe artifact and the effect it has had on those who have come into contact with it over the years. While appraising the estate of a New Hampshire family descended from a North Dakota Indian agent, Faye Travers is startled to discover a rare moose skin and cedar drum fashioned long ago by an Ojibwe artisan. And so begins an illuminating journey both backward and forward in time, following the strange passage of a powerful yet delicate instrument, and revealing the extraordinary lives it has touched and defined. Compelling and unforgettable, Louise Erdrich''s Painted Drum explores the often-fraught relationship between mothers and daughters, the strength of family, and the intricate rhythms of grief with all the grace, wit, and startling beauty that characterizes this acclaimed author''s finest work.

“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.

Winner of the Scott O''Dell Award for Historical Fiction, The Game of Silence is the second novel in the critically acclaimed Birchbark House series by New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich. Her name is Omakayas, or Little Frog, because her first step was a hop, and she lives on an island in Lake Superior. One day in 1850, Omakayas’s island is visited by a group of mysterious people. From them, she learns that the chimookomanag, or white people, want Omakayas and her people to leave their island and move farther west. That day, Omakayas realizes that something so valuable, so important that she never knew she had it in the first place, could be in danger: Her way of life. Her home. The Birchbark House Series is the story of one Ojibwe family’s journey through one hundred years in America. The New York Times Book Review raved about The Game of Silence: “Erdrich has created a world, fictional but real: absorbing, funny, serious and convincingly human.”

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

An epic study in the varieties of love from one of America’s greatest story-weavers, and winner of the National Book Award for Fiction 2012.

Chez le peuple des Ojibwe, dans la famille d''Omakayas, quand les adultes doivent discuter d''un sujet important, ils prévoient des petits cadeaux pour les gagnants du jeu du silence. Pendant que les enfants y jouent de toutes leurs forces, ils peuvent débattre sans s''occuper d''eux. Omakayas a 9 ans et elle a traversé tant d''épreuves, survécu à tant de choses, qu''elle gagne toujours à ce jeu. Et ce soir encore, elle espère battre son petit frère Pinçon, ses cousines Aube Naissante, Petite Abeille et Deux Coups, et même le nouveau venu, le Garçon Fâché, que sa famille a recueilli orphelin, en haillons, affamé. Ce soir, tous les enfants gagnent. Sans joie. Le président des Blancs, les Grands Couteaux, vient d''envoyer un message terrible. Il veut prendre aux Ojibwe ce qu''ils ont de plus précieux : le droit de vivre ici, sur la terre de leurs ancêtres, à l''endroit qu''ils aiment, sur l''île du Pic à poitrine d''or. Il ne leur reste que quelques saisons pour faire face. Ce livre est la suite d''Omakayas, paru en 2002 dans la même collection.

"1918. De retour du front, Fidelis Waldvogel, un jeune soldat allemand, tente sa chance en Amérique. Avec pour seul bagage une valise pleine de couteaux et de saucisses, il s''arrête à Argus, dans le Dakota du Nord où, bientôt rejoint par sa femme et son fils, il décide d''ouvrir une boucherie et de fonder une chorale, en souvenir de celle des maîtres bouchers où chantait son père. Des années 1920 aux années 1950, entre l''Europe et l''Amérique, ce roman à la fois épique et intime retrace le destin d''une famille confrontée au tumulte du monde." (Source : 4° de couverture)

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