The Round House

Hailed in the US as a Native-American To Kill A Mockingbird, and winner of the US National Book Award, The Round House is Louise Erdrich’s undeniable – and unmissable – masterpiece.

A mother is brutally raped by a man on their North Dakota reservation where she lives with her husband and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. Traumatized and afraid, she takes to her bed and refuses to talk to anyone – including the police.

While her husband, a tribal judge, endeavours to wrest justice from a situation that defies his keenest efforts, young Joe’s world shifts on its child’s axis. Confused, and nursing a complicated fury, Joe sets out to find answers that might put his mother’s attacker behind bars – and make everything right again. Or so he hopes.

The Round House is a poignant and abundantly humane story of a young boy pitched prematurely into an unjust adult world. It is a story of vivid survival; and tt confirms Louise Erdrich as one of America’s most distinctive contemporary novelists.