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Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

Literary fiction

Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

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Quick take

Rather than merely capturing the horror of such circumstances, Erdrich also offers her characters and readers the comfort of radical love.

Synopsis

Louise Erdrich, the author of bestselling novels including 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 a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.

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. 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. 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. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. 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.

Free sample

Future Home of the Living God

August 7 When I tell you that my white name is Cedar Hawk Songmaker and that I am the adopted child of Minneapolis liberals, and that when I went looking for my Ojibwe parents and found that I was born Mary Potts I hid the knowledge, maybe you'll understand. Or not. I'll write this anyway, because ever since last week things have changed. Apparently—I mean, nobody knows—our world is running backward. Or forward. Or maybe sideways, in a way as yet ungrasped. I am sure somebody will come up with a name for what is happening, but I cannot imagine how everything around us and everything within us can be fixed. What is happening involves the invisible, the quanta of which we are created. Whatever is actually occurring, there is constant breaking news about how it will be handled—speculation, really, concerning what comes next—which is why I am writing an account. Historic times! There have always been letters and diaries written in times of tumult and discovered later, and my thought is that I could be writing one of those. And even though I realize that all lexical knowledge may be useless, you'll have this record. Did I mention I'm four months pregnant? With you?

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Why I love it

"The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don’t know what is happening." Like any good dystopian thriller, Future Home of the Living God externalizes present-day anxieties with such imagination that you both forget about your fears and imagine the worst possible manifestation of them. That rare effect begins with the voice of 26-year-old Cedar Songmaker, our warm, chatty narrator and hand-holder through the apocalypse. What starts as writing letters to her unborn child becomes a way for Cedar to think through the unthinkable. Louise Erdrich can see through Cedar's eyes so completely and clearly that even her white hot panic can be articulated. The circuit from Cedar’s heart to her brain to her sentences is as short as can be—immediate but thorough, startled but precise, and one of the last things she can call her own.

Rather than merely capturing the horror of such circumstances, Erdrich also offers her characters and readers the comfort of radical love. Makeshift families become the only way to cherish the last days of humanity. The characters surrounding Cedar become your loves, too. My favorite parts of the book were her biological mother’s husband’s daily treatises on why to not kill yourself (he, too, uses writing to feel his way along the darkened hallway of humanity’s future): "Who says any complexity is irreducible? IT IS BEING REDUCED ALL AROUND US RIGHT NOW." Just not in this beautiful book.

Member ratings (1,930)

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Literary fiction
View all
Intermezzo
The Book of George
Real Americans
Dirty Diana
Wellness
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
The God of the Woods
Same As It Ever Was
Annie Bot
Bear
Mercury
True Biz
Family Happiness
The Lady Waiting
The Other Valley
Hard by a Great Forest
Good Material
The Bullet Swallower
Happy All the Time
Rental House
Alice Sadie Celine
Let Us Descend
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Shark Heart
Homeseeking
Transcendent Kingdom
Hello Beautiful
Dominicana
What's Mine and Yours
The Unsettled
Ask Again, Yes
Vladimir
Infinite Country
The Prophets
Normal People
The Verifiers
Salvage the Bones
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
I Have Some Questions for You
Black Buck
The History of Love
Age of Vice
Paper Names
The Light Pirate
The Secret History
The Kite Runner
Memorial
The Half Moon
Happiness Falls
The Gifted School
The Death of Vivek Oji
The Knockout Queen
Little Monsters
Yerba Buena
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Free Food for Millionaires
A Burning
The Mothers
The Water Dancer
Small Country
The Sympathizer
Fleishman Is in Trouble
Lot
An American Marriage
The Animators
The Mars Room
Exit West
White Fur
Woman No. 17
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Eat Only When You're Hungry
Rainbirds
A Ladder to the Sky
Golden Child
The Goldfinch
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P
& Sons
The Association of Small Bombs
Lolly Willowes
All Grown Up
Marlena
Signal Fires
Someday, Maybe
Woman of Light
Marrying the Ketchups
The Shards
Blue Sisters