The Plague of Doves is one of the major achievements of Louise Erdrich's considerable oeuvre, a quintessentially American story and the most complex and original of her books.

Bound by love, torn by history, the two communities' collective stories finally come together in a wrenching truth revealed in the novel's final pages. In distinct and winning voices, Erdrich's narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in this corner of North Dakota. Nobody understands the weight of historical injustice better than Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, a thoughtful mixed blood who witnesses the lives of those who appear before him, and whose own love life reflects the entire history of the territory. The two go looking for her and see her speeding home. She twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award, for her debut novel, Love Medicine, and for LaRose.The Plague of Doves, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. They realize Joes mother and Bazils wife, Geraldine Coutts, has not come home from an errand. Louise Erdrich is a multiawardwinning author of Native American descent. Mooshum, Evelina's grandfather, is a seductive storyteller, a repository of family and tribal history with an all-too-intimate knowledge of the violent past. The novel opens with Joe Coutts and his father, Judge Bazil Coutts, pulling out saplings from their houses garden and foundation. The descendants of Ojibwe and white intermarry, their lives intertwine only the youngest generation, of mixed blood, remains unaware of the role the past continues to play in their lives.Įvelina Harp is a witty, ambitious young girl, part Ojibwe, part white, who is prone to falling hopelessly in love.

The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. Louise Erdrich's mesmerizing new novel, her first in almost three years, centers on a compelling mystery.

The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich