Best Fiction & Literature
Best Metaphysical & Visionary Fiction
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. 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. 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. “Erdrich stuns again in FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD…She grounds her story in a kind of sharply drawn reality that makes the standard tropes of dark futurism that much more unnerving…Erdrich is a writer whose words carry a spiritual weight far beyond science, or fiction.” ( Entertainment Weekly ). “A page-turner…with lucid language and gripping scenes…Among the book’s many strengths are its urgency and suspense as well as the immediacy of its voice…Erdrich’s sense of humor manages to make the darkness fresh and plausible…She applies her stinging perspective to remind readers how much has happened, how much keeps happening and how far humans have yet to go.” ( Chicago Tribune ).
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"In Erdrich's world, the situation has developed quickly in the context of climate change and ecological collapse, rendering most of the social and economic conditions, services and institutions either inaccessible or eradicated. Another point of similarity is that Erdrich gives us a first person narrative in the form of a journal written by Cedar, addressed to the unborn child she is carrying, with occasional additions of letters and excerpts from the manuscript of a novel being written by Eddy, the husband of Cedar's birth mother. Erdrich's heroine, Cedar, is a young woman who has learned she was adopted by her parents, affluent post-hippy types, benevolent and loving. Cedar's situation develops, with a variety of complications related to her encounter with her tribal family, and the beginning of divided loyalties on the personal level as she tries to maintain her loving relationship with her adoptive family and also to cope with her relationship with Phil, the father of her baby. The more serious situation is her effort to hide until she gives birth once it is widely known that pregnant women are being rounded up. There is a sense of desperation that is not part of the narrative (though there is plenty of desperaton and tension in the events), but is a feeling that Erdrich is struggling to take control of a style and narrative form that is not her usual fictional world; it is as though the familiar dystopian tropes exercise a damaging or distorting force that distracts her from the best of her fictional instincts."
"Louise Eldrich’s FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD is a post-apocalyptic nightmarish novel that brings to mind Margaret Atwood’s HANDMAIDS TALE and MADDADAM trilogy, with bits of P. D. James’s CHILDREN OF MEN thrown in for good measure. The story is set in an undetermined future where genetic anomalies have resulted in the devolution of life on earth. As the story progresses, Cedar must figure out a way to protect her unborn child from a government now ruled by religion (the “Church of the New Constitution”), a government determined to get its hands on any pregnant women in hopes of stopping a genetic nightmare. She is Native American, but she was raised by two white liberal hippies in Minneapolis. How did genetics start working backwards, turning the earth into a mutated mess? There are definitely parts of this novel that are very much like HANDMAID’S TALE (where fertile women are enslaved by a religiously-controlled government) and like the MADDADAM novels (where genetic manipulation has decimated like on earth)."
"As she learns her own history and struggles with the fact that, as a pregnant woman, she's now horribly of interest to society - of such interest that people will do anything to take her - I was so deeply riveted that I simply couldn't stop reading. It's not one of those literary dystopic novels that's really just an excuse for bloviating about art and culture and society and connections. Here, instead, our soft apocalyptic events lead to an unmasking of the rot in the heart of humanity."