Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich (1954 - ) is a novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, memoirist, and young adult-and-children’s book writer. She is also a bookseller in the retail sense, the owner of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I remember reading short stories by her in Atlantic Monthly in the late 70s, confident and powerful stories, exotic for being set in contemporary Chippewa communities in the upper Midwest. Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Nation, matrilineally descended. She was Dartmouth ‘76, the first class of women at the college. A writer since childhood, she arrived on the American literary scene practiced and graceful and eloquent — and has only fulfilled and transcended the promise of those early stories, which became the novel Love Medicine (1984).
The novel before The Sentence (2021), The Night Watchman (2020), won the Pulitzer Prize.
The Beet Queen
The Beet Queen
From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Louise Erdrich comes this vibrant tale of abandonment and sexual obsession, jealousy, and unstinting love.
On a spring morning in 1932, young Karl and Mary Adare arrive by boxcar in Argus, North Dakota. After being orphaned in a most peculiar way, Mary seeks refuge in the butcher shop of their aunt and her husband, while Karl gets back on the train. So begins an exhilarating forty-year saga brimming with colorful, unforgettable characters: ordinary Mary, who will cause a miracle; seductive Karl, who lacks his sister's gift for survival; Sita, their lovely but disturbed cousin; and the half-Native American Celestine James, who will become Mary's best friend. Theirs is a story grounded in the tenacity of relationships, the extraordinary magic of natural events, and the unending mystery of the human condition.
Bestselling, National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich dazzles in this vibrant and heartfelt tale of abandonment and sexual obsession, jealousy and unstinting love that explores with empathy, humor, and power the eternal mystery of the human condition.
"A perfect--and perfectly wonderful--novel."--Anne Tyler