![]() ![]() ![]() The following interview has been edited for clarity. When we met in a dim, cool Chinese café in midtown Chicago on a recent hot afternoon, Louise Erdrich, tall and elegant in a black silk sweater and patterned scarf, spoke quietly and clearly about how this novel-her fifteenth-came as a surprise to her. Here the history of both people and land resurface within the story to compel a new understanding about how human justice works: the balance it seeks, the toll it takes. As is so often the case in Erdrich’s work, in LaRose the past is not past. As both families cope with the loss of one boy and the fragile peace brought by LaRose himself-who becomes a shared son-this arrangement both deepens and frays the ties among the wide cast of characters, whether they are of Native, white, or mixed heritage. ![]() When Landreaux Iron, while hunting, accidentally kills the son of a friend and neighbor, he and his wife Emmaline make the agonizing decision to give their own son LaRose to the grieving family to raise-an act of reparation drawn from traditional Native precedent. ![]() What happens next is a story about how guilt, justice, and atonement ricochet through the lives of two families as well as their close-knit community. In National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich’s gripping new novel LaRose, a shocking and tragic act ends a child’s life in the first few pages of the book. ![]()
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