It isn't long before pregnant women are being rounded up. Or maybe sideways.' Flora and fauna are taking on prehistoric characteristics, and there is talk of viruses. But times are strange: 'our world is running backward. Happily raised and well-educated by her adopted parents Sera and Glen Songmaker, Cedar decides nevertheless to visit her Ojibwe birth family on the rez up north.

Set in Minnesota in a dystopian future in which evolution is going haywire, much of this startling new work of speculative fiction by Erdrich (LaRose) takes the form of a diary by pregnant Cedar Hawk Songmaker addressed to her unborn child.

It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe.Ī 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. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. 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. 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. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. Twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. 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 future home of the living god