“I start off on tangents.” But she’s articulate, warm and candid as she speaks about her latest book, “Future Home of the Living God” (Harper, $28.99), a complete departure from her previous work. “This is the problem with phone interviews,” she says, a few minutes into an answer. “It might be affecting the lines.”Įrdrich, the acclaimed novelist whose 2016 “LaRose” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, likes to maintain clear communication - which is why she prefers to conduct interviews via email.
“We’ve got a snowstorm outside,” she says by telephone, because the connection is poor. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe.Ī 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.It’s already snowing in Minnesota, where Louise Erdrich lives, by mid-October. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace.
The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. 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. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. 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.
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. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. 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. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth.
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