“Cedar rebels against her super-liberal parents by becoming a Catholic,” Erdrich said. But her storytelling is seductive, and she bounces from observation to observation, as tender when talking about Lunchables as she is when she talks about Catholicism. At first, Erdrich was worried that she might not be able to craft Cedar into a character with a boisterous voice. Written as an extended letter to her unborn child, the book documents her close shaves and escapes alongside her musings on theology and life. This time around, the joyful cacophony is winnowed to one voice: our heroine, Cedar Hawk Songmaker, a pregnant woman on the run. Because it’s easy to draw allegories to the present-resistance to the government led by women, evermore frustrating news breaking on the television-the book reads like an alternate history of our anxious current moment. Like other books in this genre-most famously Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale-gender and human reproduction are key to understanding how society went off track. To sow fear was the aim.”Įrdrich’s experience of the Bush era led her to write about fear and the way citizens respond to it, which in turn led to her first dystopian thriller. “Our secular freedoms, our open society, our vibrancy and acceptance of diverse views attacked. “Our country began to deteriorate, in some ways, after 9/11,” Erdrich wrote in an e-mail to Vanity Fair. So it’s surprising to learn she began writing the book in 2002, soon after 9/11 and during the beginnings of the Iraq war. National Book Award-winner Louise Erdrich’s smart and thrilling new novel, Future Home of the Living God, is animated by the fights a world-weary reader might see in 2017: surveillance, guns, reproductive rights, and an uncertain government.

Future home of the living god