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Future Home of the Living God: A Novel Paperback – November 13, 2018
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A New York Times Notable Book
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 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. 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. 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.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication dateNovember 13, 2018
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.65 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100062694065
- ISBN-13978-0062694065
- Lexile measureHL820L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Erdrich’s inclusiveness, her expansive vision of humanity surprises and pleases on every page…Erdrich’s virtuosity reminds me of an eagle in flight…Her wisdom blossoms from multicultural sources and is always inviting the reader in, in, to deeper understanding and identity.” — Hudson Review
“A streamlined dystopian thriller…Erdrich’s tense and lyrical new work of speculative fiction stands shoulder-to-braced-shoulder right alongside The Handmaid’s Tale.” — Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“Erdrich stuns again in Future Home of The Living God…She grounds her story in a kind of sharply drawn reality that makes the standard tropes of dark futurism that much more unnerving…Erdrich is a writer whose words carry a spiritual weight far beyond science, or fiction.” — Entertainment Weekly
“Erdrich is a seer, a visionary whose politics are inextricable from her fiction…[Future Home of the Living God] is an eerie masterpiece, a novel so prescient that though it conjures an alternate reality, it often provokes the feeling that, yes this is really happening.” — O, The Oprah Magazine
“In this fast-paced novel, rapid and catastrophic changes to human reproduction make the survival of the race uncertain…Erdrich imagines an America in which winter is a casualty of climate change, borders are sealed, men are ‘militantly insecure,’ and women’s freedom is evaporating…Vivid…Compelling.” — New Yorker
“Smart and thrilling…the book reads like an alternate history of our anxious current moment…Erdrich’s storytelling is seductive.” — Vanity Fair
“A fascinating new novel, which describes a world where evolution is running backward and the future of civilization is in doubt.” — New York Times Book Review
“Philosophical yet propulsive…Future Home of the Living God is as much a thriller as it is a religious-themed literary novel — it thrives on narrow escapes, surprise character appearances, and a perpetual sense of peril…effective and cannily imagined.” — USA Today
“We recognize…the same miasma of anxiety and unease that Americans now breathe. This is fiction, of course; the details are not from our world. But the sensation is…Vivid and suspenseful…Once Cedar is imprisoned, the story turns thrilling.” — Boston Globe
“Masterful…a breakout work of speculative fiction…Erdrich enters the realm of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale…A tornadic, suspenseful, profoundly provoking novel of life’s vulnerability and insistence…with a bold apocalyptic theme, searing social critique, and high-adrenaline action.” — Booklist, Starred Review
“[A] startling new work of speculative fiction…strikingly relevant. Erdrich has written a cautionary tale for this very moment in time.” — Publishers Weekly, boxed review
“A dazzling work of dystopian fiction a la Handmaid’s Tale.” — Real Simple
“Propulsive, wry, and keenly observant…this chilling speculative fiction is perfect for readers seeking the next Handmaid’s Tale.” — Library Journal
“An original (and utterly terrifying) creation…Haunting…smart but not pretentious. It is funny, thrilling, and heartbreaking, all without missing a beat – an impressive achievement.” — BookBrowse, Starred Review
“[Erdrich] once again proves her talent for narrating a profound and compelling story.” — Ms. Magazine
From the Back Cover
Evolution stops as mysteriously as it began. Pregnancy and childbearing quickly become issues of state security. Twenty-six-year-old Cedar, the adopted daughter of idealistic Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.
As Cedar travels north to find her Ojibwe family, ordinary life begins to disintegrate. Swelling panic creates warring government, corporate, and religious factions. In a mall parking lot, Cedar witnesses a pregnant woman wrenched from her family under a new law. As she evades capture, Cedar also experiences a fraught love with her baby’s father, who tries to hide her.
An unexpected thriller from a writer of startling originality, Future Home of the Living God is also a moving meditation on female agency, love, self-determination, biology, and natural rights.
About the Author
Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Love Medicine and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Her most recent book, The Night Watchman, won the Pulitzer Prize. A ghost lives in her creaky old house.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (November 13, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0062694065
- ISBN-13 : 978-0062694065
- Lexile measure : HL820L
- Item Weight : 7.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.65 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #40,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #142 in Political Fiction (Books)
- #224 in Native American Literature (Books)
- #557 in Dystopian Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of American novelists. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She is the author of many novels, the first of which, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the last of which, The Round House, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012. She lives in Minnesota.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2018
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Erdrich makes no effort to create a coherent dystopian world where you can understand how things fit together.
Her story is more about how her protagonist-narrator Cedar/Mary Potts, deals subjectively with a chaotic and uncertain future in which evolution is reversing or suddenly veering off in bizarre directions. You won't understand it any better than she does, since it is her point of view. She is pregnant, and cannot be certain what sort of child she might be carrying, or whether either she or this little being will live through the birth. The overarching question that shapes the story is 'why go on with life, why bring another generation of human or humanoid beings into a world we no longer understand and where you cannot even expect nature to follow predictable patterns?' This theme is also carried out in Cedar/Mary's stepfather Eddy, a member of the Chippewa tribe, who also struggles with the existential question, 'why go on living,' by compulsively writing each day his reason not to commit suicide that day.
The events, characters and dialogue often have the absurd but seemingly meaningful aspect of hallucination, dream or vision. e.g. : Two heavily pregnant women escape from confinement by unraveling blankets, reweaving the yarn into a rope and rapelling down a wall, bringing along items such as books on theology. Really? Yes. This is a hallucinatory world, a dark Wonderland, even in certain passages, a strange symbolic poem.
When the world becomes incomprehensible, how and why should one continue to face each day, let alone bring children into it? Cedar/Mary's love of her child, her determination despite everything to bring it into this chaotic and bizarre existence is an affirmation of life, of faith in the eternal creativity of nature, which is 'the Word' of God.
Erdrich's spiritual roots are with mystics regardless of their religion. The 12th century anchoress Hildegard von Bingham provides the epigraph of this novel: "The Word is living, being, spiritual, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.' No doubt Erdrich intends this to link with the gospel of John, where it says that "In the beginning was the Word,and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things were made by Him . . ."
Thus the future world, whatever shape it takes, will always be the home of the Living God, formed through the creative powers of Nature. Cedar/Mary knows this, and that gives her the hope and the courage to bring her child into the world, and to see him go into the unknown without herself giving way to despair.
2016 was a year that certainly felt apocalyptic, and it made Louise Erdrich dig out the draft of this novel she'd started in 2002. It's drawn comparisons to The Handmaid's Tale, but the only real similarity is that both deal with women's bodies reduced to commodities. Considering it's 2021 and we're being subjected to attacks on women's reproductive rights as we speak, I'm surprised there aren't more books that have posited their own visions of the nightmarish dystopia we're spiraling towards.
There's a moment when Cedar, wracked with guilt over an act committed in desperation, asks her adoptive mother Sera what she thinks Hell is like. Sera answers that they're already in it, but Cedar feels hopeful despite how hard things have become for her. I think this is an important distinction in light of the fact that Cedar is an Indigenous woman and Sera is white, and also a big reason why this book feels so different from The Handmaid’s Tale to me. It's understandable that a white woman would see a major change in the status quo as something to fear. To lose one’s autonomy and personhood, to be treated as less than human and have no one come to your aid — those are unimaginable horrors. But women of color have always known what it's like to not be able to take certain freedoms for granted. The world may change, and it may be scary, but there's also potential for what comes after to be better than what there was before.
Anyway, there's a lot to appreciate in this short book. It's perhaps less cohesive and fully realized than other Erdrich novels, but it's still better than most books.
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Quite of feminine perspective. The roles of the male characters other than Eddy were a little disappointing.
I was left feeling disturbed, pondering over possible turns of story during the night, wishing for a different ending.
A warning: far too frightening read für pregnant women…. I could imagine this story a TV Series if the ending would be slightly different leaving room for a more positive future development. Or maybe I just can't imagine it.