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.The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.
Cedar feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby's origins. 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. There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women, of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in.
It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her 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.
About the Author
Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children's books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel
The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction.
The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel,
Love Medicine , was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.
Industry Reviews
Tense and memorable . . . A journey worth taking and a worthy addition to contemporary apocalyptic fiction. * Daily Mail *
Believable and absorbing . . . Smart and compelling, it's ultimately deeply unsettling . . . because it all feels horribly plausible. * SFX magazine *
Erdrich is a wonderful storyteller and this rich, poetic tapestry is shot through with threads of despair and glints of hope. She deals unflinchingly with religion's capacity to oppress, but also offers the consolations of spirituality. * Daily Mail *
If you enjoyed Naomi Alderman's The Power then Future Home is a more plangent, reflective variation on a theme . . . The tone is dreamy, close, pressing . . . an unsettling tale. * The Times *
There is something particularly filmic about Cedar's story. At times, her address to her unborn son resembles the voiceover of Sarah Connor, the pregnant mother on the run from cyborgs in the Terminator series. Erdrich's narrative is not derivative or pulpy but its scenes are fast, visual, action-packed, perfect for film. And Cedar, like Sarah, is angry, fugitive, both powerless and brave, and ultimately a hero-mother in this chilling book,which is at once a dystopia and a state-of-the-nation novel. * Financial Times *
