The Beet Queen

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.

On a spring morning in 1932, young Karl and Mary Adare arrive by boxcar in Argus, North Dakota. After being orphaned in a most peculiar way, Mary seeks refuge in the butcher shop of their aunt and her husband, while Karl gets back on the train. So begins an exhilarating forty-year saga brimming with colorful, unforgettable characters: ordinary Mary, who will cause a miracle; seductive Karl, who lacks his sister’s gift for survival; Sita, their lovely but disturbed cousin; and the half–Native American Celestine James, who will become Mary’s best friend. Theirs is a story grounded in the tenacity of relationships, the extraordinary magic of natural events, and the unending mystery of the human condition.
Bestselling, National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich dazzles in this vibrant and heartfelt tale of abandonment and sexual obsession, jealousy and unstinting love that explores with empathy, humor, and power the eternal mystery of the human condition.
 

“A novel rich in movement, beauty, event. Her prose spins and sparkles, and dances right on the heart when it needs to.” — Los Angeles Times
“Written with extraordinary power, compassion, and insight into the human heart....Erdrich has vaulted into the front ranks of American literature.” — Newsday
“A remarkable and luminous novel.” — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"Captivating." — Washington Post Book World
“The dialogue is brilliant from start to finish. And Mary, Karl, Selestine, Sita, and Dot are all original and powerful characters who, like their relatives in Love Medicine, left me exhilarated, somewhat drained, and very grateful to this immensely gifted novelist." — Chicago Sun-Times
“A book of power and precision.” — New York Times Book Review