From one of the most revered novelists of our time, an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.
One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface because Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.
While his father, a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.
The Round House is a page-turning masterpiece—at once a powerful coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a tender, moving novel of family, history, and culture.
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Multi-generational chronicles of Ojibwe history, tribal sovereignty, and family bonds in the northern Midwest form the core of a major body of American fiction spanning four decades. Native American author Louise Erdrich launched her career with the award-winning novel Love Medicine in 1984, establishing an interconnected literary landscape rooted in North Dakota lands where Native and Anglo-American cultures intersect.
Born Karen Louise Erdrich on June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota, she was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota, as the eldest of seven children. Her mother was of Ojibwe descent from the Turtle Mountain Reservation, and her father was of German ancestry, with both parents working as educators at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. An enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, Erdrich earned early recognition with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. Over a career encompassing 28 books—including poetry, short stories, children's literature, and a memoir—she also established Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in Minnesota.
Widely recognized for her role in the second wave of the Native American Renaissance, Erdrich frequently employs ensemble casts, recursive timelines, and shifting narrative perspectives to explore Ojibwe heritage, historical memory, and reservation life. Her work weaves Chippewa mythic traditions into Anglo-American literary structures, examining complex legal and social struggles while balancing heavy themes with humor and community resilience. In addition to realistic historical and contemporary fiction, her writing encompasses speculative narrative styles, as demonstrated in her dystopian novel Future Home of the Living God.
