The Mighty Red - by Louise Erdrich

About the Book

Book Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK - LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION - A FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION

"A sweeping, tender-hearted epic."--Harper's Bazaar

In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people's lives.

History is a flood. The mighty red . . .

In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding.

Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.

Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He's determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.

Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter's and her own.

Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.

The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a major literary event; gorgeous and heartrending, The Mighty Red is a triumph.

Review Quotes

"[Erdrich is] a master, a legend at building stories around community. . . . This is a book about family and community. It is a book about upward mobility and finding our true passions. You will love Kismet." -- Jenna Bush Hager, Today/The Read with Jenna Book Club

"In the hands of this master storyteller, everything is effortlessly connected. . . . Fearlessly depicting the toughest losses and darkest threats, Erdrich always finds hope." -- Oprah Daily

"A heart-wrenching story of how human lives are susceptible to nature's impact." -- People

"In The Mighty Red, humor and sorrow are fused together like twined tree trunks that keep each other standing.... Erdrich is so good at romantic comedy, with her special blend of Austen sense and Ojibwe sensibility. As the funny scenes flow one after another, you may not even notice the stray drops of blood scattered along the novel's margins. . . . As usual when closing a book by Louise Erdrich, I'm left wondering, how can a novel be so funny and so moving? How can life?" -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

"A novel set in a small prairie community in Argus, North Dakota, that somehow also captures the world." -- Parade

"Erdrich should be a major contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and her new novel, The Mighty Red, only strengthens that case. . . . The book is deliciously strange, entirely captivating, another outright triumph. Daffiness mingles with brutality, high comedy with wrenching tragedy. . . . By turns heartrending and hilarious, righteously angry and expansively numinous... [S]imultaneously dramatizes a hideous history of exploitation and degradation and offers hope. . . . That Erdrich does all of this with such apparent ease, grace, and joy is a testament to her surpassing greatness and a glorious gift to her readers." -- Boston Globe

"An immersive domestic drama . . . that, like much of Erdrich's oeuvre, speaks to the acrimony at the heart of the American national project." -- New York Times

"A poignant novel of place. . . . Sweetness blends indissolubly with tragedy." -- Wall Street Journal

"[A] deft, almost winsome novel. . . . Erdrich's writing feels both effortless and wise. . . . In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A captivating tale of love and everyday life amid environmental upheaval and the 2008 financial crisis. . . . Erdrich excels at the slow simmer, and once again she delivers a deliciously seductive masterwork." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"While the novel touches on tragedy, it also includes scenes of sheer comedic delight. No one describes a book-group meeting better than Erdrich. Pulitzer Price and National Book Award winner Erdrich (The Sentence) yet again displays her storytelling skills." -- Library Journal (starred review)

"[A] finely woven tale of anguish and desire, crimes and healing. With irresistible characters, dramatic predicaments, crisp wit, gorgeously rendered settings, striking ecological facts, and a cosmic dimension, Erdrich's latest tale of the plains reverberates with arresting revelations." -- Booklist

"A new novel from Louise Erdrich....is always a literary event, and her latest continues one of American literature's most remarkable winning streaks[, ] touching on everything from the climate crisis to the way in which familial dynasties visit their failings and foibles on each generation." -- The Guardian

"A new novel from Louise Erdrich--winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, if you didn't know--is always something to celebrate... Start clearing off space on your bedside table now." -- Literary Hub

"[A]n enthralling ode and elegy to the people of North Dakota's Red River Valley.... Erdrich is at her best... .There is an amiable, inventive quality to all of Erdrich's 19 novels that in part explains how it is possible to be hugely entertained while learning why farmers require increasingly powerful pesticides or what our collective sweet tooth is costing the planet.... Erdrich calls on us to heal our frayed bond with the earth, and to regard it, as she does, with wonder." -- Los Angeles Times

"[A]s good a novel as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Erdrich has written and, as most will agree, that's saying a lot." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Erdrich's writing is as hilarious as it is heart-wrenching, as focus on the minutiae of insular community as it is on encompassing concerns like our stewardship of the earth." -- Seattle Times

"[A] captivating multigenerational tale set amid the 2008 financial crisis." -- Time

"The Mighty Red might just be a new American classic." -- Bookpage

"[A] sweeping, tender-hearted epic about ordinary people who have no option but to forge ahead in the face of tragedy." -- Harper's Bazaar

"Erdrich is back with another brilliant, funny, profound story of people and place, earth and spirit." -- Newsday

"[A]nother must-read from the acclaimed author...a moving story of mothers and daughters set amid the economic collapse and the devastating impacts of industrial farming." -- Town & Country

"[A] rich saga." -- Vanity Fair

"This powerful story conjures the tumultuousness of the modern world. It's the kind of book that makes you go, 'Yes! This is why I read!'" -- Real Simple

"A beautifully achieved story of ordinary lives shaped by love, work and landscape." -- Sainsbury's Magazine

"Erdrich's prose is lovely.... There's lots more here about love and loss and the things people do when they experience the highs and lows of both.... [W]hen we finally get the truth, it's a powerful moment, and one that sets the scene for, if not forgiveness, some measure of peace." -- Associated Press

"It's a singular pleasure to read a novel that begins with the everyday struggles of ordinary people and steadily builds into something larger, linking the quotidian with the profound. That is the potent splendor contained in Louise Erdrich's works, and it continues with her latest novel, The Mighty Red.... [T]his is a generous-hearted tale of competing loves, wistful regrets and second chances.... [A]t once a tender coming-of-age story and a wise tale of older love." -- WBUR

"In her first novel since The Sentence, Erdrich displays all her writing talents.... [The Mighty Red] is tender-hearted, often funny and sometimes dark.... Describing the plot of The Mighty Red can't capture Erdrich's poetic writing about hopes, dreams, hallucinations, fears and tragedy." -- St. Paul Pioneer Press

"The way Erdrich's characters look at and deal with the world remains as grounded and enchanting as ever. She is a treasure." -- Daily Kos

"Absorbing." -- AARP

"When Louise Erdrich releases a book, you pay attention.... Erdrich employs her signature wisdom, compassion, and moments of humor to bring these characters to life as they navigate economic and emotional hardship, with flashes of connection." -- The Skimm

"Erdrich returns with another emotionally resonant novel -- about trauma, grief, love and forgiveness -- that proves she hasn't lost her knack for engendering empathy in deeply flawed characters, for mining meaning out of the small moments and for seamlessly wading into one of the most controversial issues of the day." -- New York Post