The Antidote

A brilliant writer with an amazing imagination

The Times

Russell has deep and true talent

San Francisco Chronicle

It’s magic, a book doing this big work and also making it propulsive, eminently readable. Russell has rendered with soul and urgency the vast inexpressible ache at the heart of American gratitude

KAVEH AKBAR, author of Martyr!

This novel swept me up and carried me away, even while somehow burying me, and digging up something about the story of [America] I didn’t know I needed to know

TOMMY ORANGE, author of Wandering Stars

Russell is truly one of the greatest writers of our time... every page is pocked with joy, beauty, wildness and the perfect wisdom of mystery

RIVKA GALCHEN, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch

Karen Russell is one of our most humane and generous writers; this book is as profound as it is wonderfully strange

LAUREN GROFF, author of Matrix

Here in The Antidote, Karen Russel has summoned her singular brand of alchemy and created an epic of heart and devastation, community and laughter, death and life. A book that has it all. An absolute wonder

NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, author of Chain-Gang All-Stars

Karen Russell proves once again that there is no limit to her extraordinary imagination. She creates marvels out of what we imagine to be the ordinary world, she turns the historical novel upside down and shake from it a thing of exquisite beauty that is unlike anything you’ve ever read

DINAW MENGESTU, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Russell’s prose is something to be savored... Her language is both lush and sharp, weaving a dreamlike quality into the story that makes the characters’ emotional journeys feel all the more visceral. Russell navigates these emotional landscapes with care and respect and the distinct gift she carries that is heaven—I mean Love

MORGAN TALTY, author of Fire Exit

Karen Russell’s novel is generous, profound, and will stay with me for a long time

KELLY LINK, author of Get in Trouble

A singular, haunting vision that fearlessly excavates the past and challenges the reader to face the future head-on. A storytelling tour de force

Kirkus (starred review)

Spellbinding... an inspired and unforgettable fusion of the gritty and the fantastic

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Russell gets better and better with every word, she is a pure dust storm of utter genius

DAISY JOHNSON, author of Everything Under

Brilliant... [Russell] writes like nobody else on the planet

TÉA OBREHT, author of The Tiger's Wife

Russell’s… potent prose and sheer originality consistently dazzle

Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday

An elaborate embroidery of social, geological, historical, and environmental research on the impact of American Western expansion… [Russell’s] sharp narrative grasp guides the reader from character to character as the book unfolds’

Los Angeles Times

Powerful... weaves together a kind of rural American magic realism with passionate care for the natural world we’re so busy destroying

Erica Wagner, Financial Times