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Narrated by Louise Erdrich
Louise ErdrichUnabridged — 14 hours, 37 minutes
Narrated by Louise Erdrich
Louise ErdrichUnabridged — 14 hours, 37 minutes
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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction
Finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award
In this literary masterwork, Louise Erdrich, bestselling author of the National Book Award-winning*The Round House*and the*Pulitzer Prize*nominee*The Plague of Doves,*wields her breathtaking narrative magic in an emotionally haunting contemporary tale of a tragic accident, a demand for justice, and a profound act of atonement with ancient roots in Native American culture.
North Dakota, late summer, 1999. Landreaux Iron stalks a deer along the edge of the property bordering his own. He shoots with easy confidence-but when the buck springs away, Landreaux realizes he's hit something else, a blur he saw as he squeezed the trigger. When he staggers closer, he realizes he has killed his neighbor's five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich.
The youngest child of his friend and neighbor, Peter Ravich, Dusty was best friends with Landreaux's five-year-old son, LaRose. The two families have always been close, sharing food, clothing, and rides into town; their children played together despite going to different schools; and Landreaux's wife, Emmaline, is half sister to Dusty's mother, Nola. Horrified at what he's done, the recovered alcoholic turns to an Ojibwe tribe tradition-the sweat lodge-for guidance, and finds a way forward. Following an ancient means of retribution, he and Emmaline will give LaRose to the grieving Peter and Nola. “Our son will be your son now,” they tell them.
LaRose is quickly absorbed into his new family. Plagued by thoughts of suicide, Nola dotes on him, keeping her darkness at bay. His fierce, rebellious new “sister,” Maggie, welcomes him as a coconspirator who can ease her volatile mother's terrifying moods. Gradually he's allowed shared visits with his birth family, whose sorrow mirrors the Raviches' own. As the years pass, LaRose becomes the linchpin linking the Irons and the Raviches, and eventually their mutual pain begins to heal.
But when a vengeful man with a long-standing grudge against Landreaux begins raising trouble, hurling accusations of a cover-up the day Dusty died, he threatens the tenuous peace that has kept these two fragile families whole.
Inspiring and affecting,*LaRose*is a powerful exploration of loss, justice, and the reparation of the human heart, and an unforgettable, dazzling tour de force from one of America's most distinguished literary masters.
The radiance of this many-faceted novel is generated by Erdrich’s tenderness for her characters…magnificent…a brilliantly imagined and constructed saga of empathy, elegy, spirituality, resilience, wit, wonder, and hope that will stand as a defining master work of American literature for generations to come.
A stunning novel…A heartbreaking tale of love, family, and obligation that spans generations.
Electrifying...Louise Erdrich’s...most brilliant novel.
A fiercely resonant exploration of love, loss, and the tangled ties that bind.
Louise Erdrich’s latest novel LAROSE is, as usual, a gift to treasure… Erdrich writes about reconnection and reconciliation with such purity and precision, she’ll crack your heart right open, then mend it with care and leave your whole soul singing with joy.
In someone else’s hands, this might turn out to be a stark morality tale or a pure tearjerker. In Louise Erdrich’s, it’s something else altogether… a novel more generous and less predictable than might be expected, where revenge and human planning in general take second place to life working itself out in ways that no one human can predict or control.
A complex tapestry of retribution and acceptance…Ever the master of emotions, Erdrich…incorporates elements of guilt, justice and atonement.
Mesmerizing… Throughout her body of work, Erdrich has woven complex narratives with rich character detail and the cultural traditions of her Native American background. In LaRose, her greatest strengths are on display as all these strands come together under her masterful control.
…a brutal, ultimately buoyant dramatization of the way unexpected kinships heal us.
A powerful evocation of two families’ struggle to overcome misfortune..
Erdrich’s created an entire world, a realm bristling with a sense of place, where plots unwind and surprise, the spirit world suffuses everyday existence, and the past is as much a part of the present as breathing…magnificent…It is Erdrich at the top of her form.
Told with aching understanding…This timeless 15th novel stands as one of Erdrich’s best: comprehending and comprehensive, full of cascading, resonant details punctuated with spiky humor.
Breathtaking…[LaRose] may be her most graceful creation…The recurring miracle of Erdrich’s fiction is that nothing feels miraculous in her novels. She gently insists there are abiding spirits in this land and alternative ways of living and forgiving that have somehow survived the West’s best efforts to snuff them out.
Erdrich’s richly layered tale brings a host of fascinating characters to life as it builds to its haunting resolution.
…[a] superb new novel…[Erdrich immerses] us in this remarkable world so thoroughly, so satisfyingly…
…[a] sad, wise, funny novel, in which [Erdrich] takes the native storytelling tradition that informs her work and remakes it for the modern world, stitching its tattered remnants into a vibrant living fabric.
[Erdrich] is, like Faulkner, one of the great American regionalists, bearing the dark knowledge of her place, as he did his. She is by now among the very best of American writers.
[Erdrich] has laid out one of the most arresting visions of America in one of its most neglected corners, a tableaux on par with Faulkner, a place both perilous and haunted, cursed and blessed.
...a magnificent, sorrowful tale of justice, retribution, and love.
Incandescent…Erdrich has always been fascinated by the relationship between revenge and justice, but…LaRose comes down firmly on the side of forgiveness. Can a person do the worst possible thing and still be loved? Erdrich’s answer is a resounding yes.
Remarkable…As the novel draws to a conclusion, the suspense is ratcheted up, but never at the expense of Erdrich’s reflective power or meditative lyricism…One of Erdrich’s finest achievements.
You’re going to want to take your time with this book, so lavish in its generational scope, its fierce torrent of wrongs and its luxurious heart. Anyway, you may have no choice, as you fall under the spell of a master… Like Toni Morrison, like Tolstoy, like Steinbeck, Erdrich writes her characters with a helpless love and witnesses them with a supreme absence of judgment…[a] beautiful novel.
The rewards of LAROSE lie in the quick unraveling and the slow reconstruction of these lives to a moment when animosities resolve, like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, into clarity and understanding...Told with constraint and conviction...
A masterly tale of grief and love…Erdrich never missteps…The recurring miracle of Erdrich’s fiction is that nothing feels miraculous in her novels. She gently insists that there are abiding spirits in this land and alternative ways of living and forgiving that have somehow survived the West’s best efforts to snuff them out.
…a brutal, ultimately buoyant dramatization of the way unexpected kinships heal us.
12/01/2015
Set in 1999 North Dakota, this new work concludes a trilogy begun with the Anisfield-Wolf Award winner The Plague of Doves and the National Book Award winner The Round House. Landreaux Iron is deer hunting when he inadvertently shoots and kills five-year-old Dusty Ravich, son of best friend Pete Ravich and his own son LaRose's favorite buddy. To make amends, the grief-stricken Landreaux falls back on a traditional means of retribution, giving LaRose to Pete and his wife. With a 200,000-copy first printing.
Having accidentally killed his neighbors’ young son, a man offers in exchange his own boy, LaRose. This ancient act of tribal justice entwines these already tragically connected families in unanticipated ways. The Ravich and Iron families are clearly as alive to Erdrich as the ghosts with whom the mystical LaRose communes. As narrator, Erdrich inhabits them—dark, light, comic, confused—with apparent effortlessness. She delivers with equal ease mythic stories, slapstick nursing home exchanges, teen angst, and all-consuming grief. She even gives a rousing volleyball play-by-play with significance well beyond the game on the court. To keep the emotions she, as author, has created, Erdrich, as narrator, digs deep. LAROSE is a winning story that will leave listeners cheering. K.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940160504568 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 05/10/2016 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
