LaRose - Couverture rigide

Louise Erdrich is the most interesting American novelist to have appeared in years (Philip Roth)

Electric, nimble, and perceptive, this novel is about 'the phosphorous of grief' but also, more essentially, about the emotions men need, but rarely get, from one another. (Kirkus Reviews [starred review])

Powerful and affecting, LaRose is the story of two heartbroken families and the fragile bond between them in the wake of a major loss. (Buzzfeed, Incredible New Books You Need To Read This Spring)

Louise Erdrich is a literary icon, and her newest book is just as beautiful as her previous award-winners . . . Pushed forward by the deep and complex emotions that surround grief and inheritance, this novel will take you on a phenomenal ride. (Bustle.com)

Edrich's prose style is hugely engaging, a lovely, tender unfurling of day-to-day concerns and emotions alongside the mystical world of seat lodges, visions and visits from long lost elders (Sunday Express)

A magnificent, sorrowful tale of justice, retribution, and love (Vanity Fair)

A chronicler of the continuing destruction of Native American communities, she writes beautifully about what Indian children used to learn from their parents (Herald)

Grief and guilt and unquenchable yearning overwhelm the pages ... Erdrich has considerable powers as a writer of tragedy and comedy ... it's wonderful (Literary Review)

Erdrich is a poet of lists, placing like and unlike together as if they were a series of Christmas lights, each individually illuminating, each gaining luster and brilliance from its placement, the whole blazing, incandescent . . . Perhaps the most important of Erdrich's achievements is her mastery of complex forms . . . Woven into the specificity of these narratives is Erdrich's determination to speak of the most pressing human questions (New York Times)

LaRose, [Erdrich's] 15th novel, is excellent. It is heartbreaking; it is nuanced; the prose is as strong and stark as the wintry western landscape it describes. The story is both simple and incredibly complex . . . Erdrich exposes the messy aftermath of a tragedy. She does so without sentimentality, without pity. Her themes are the limitations of love as a healing power as much as the healing power of love. It is important to say that Erdrich is one of the greatest living American writers, and LaRose is brilliant (Guardian)

In this literary masterwork, Louise Erdrich, the 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.