Erdrich, Louise

Examines the lives of several generations of families who live on and around a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota, following various characters who suffer due to government policies, poverty, alcoholism, and other problems.

A woman remembers her childhood in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota, when a wood-burning stove, the Range Eternal, provided a center to her home and her family, providing food, warming feet on cold mornings, and chasing away the ice monster at night.

A novelist writes of her experiences during a 12 month period through pregnancy, new motherhood, and return to writing.

In the early 1930s, Karl and his sister Mary Adare, arrive by boxcar in Argus, a small off-reservation town in North Dakota. Orphaned, they look to their mother's sister Fritzie and her husband for refuge.

A collection of thirty short stories written by author Louise Erdrich over the last thirty years, exploring the mystical occurrences of everyday life and the intermingling of beauty and violence and comedy and tragedy.

In 1911, a farm family is killed in Pluto, North Dakota, and three Ojibwe are lynched for the murders even though there is no evidence of their guilt; and years later, the events of the crime reverberate among the descendants of those involved.

Faye Travers, a middle-aged divorcee and specialist in Native American antiquities, discovers a rare ceremonial drum while assessing the estate of a New Hampshire man descended from an Indian agent, and, when she hears the sound of the drum without even touching the instrument, she feels compelled to steal it and return it to a North Dakota reservation where its remarkable history is revealed.

Told in the alternating voices of a wise Chippewa Indian leader, and a young, embittered mixed-blood woman, the novel chronicles the drama of daily lives overshadowed by the clash of cultures and mythologies.