'An extravagant and colourful story of family feuds, illicit love and murder... a lavish celebration of the natural world and the mysteries that lie within it.' Sunday Telegraph 'Rocks and rollicks between drama and comedy, and then swoops and soars into descriptions of romantic and religious exaltation... Some of Erdrich's setpieces are dazzlingly funny, while her evocations of suffering and loss can be heartbreaking.' TLS 'Encompasses a profound sense of the astonishing range of human yearning: the ways in which people and communities find the love, laughter and meanings they need to get through.' Independent 'Erdrich's North Dakota has the same mythological imprint as Annie Proulx's Newfoundland. Best enjoyed on a veranda with something sweet and distilled.' Guardian 'Magnificent... Erdrich is a marvellous storyteller' The Times 'Erdrich's best so far... dazzling' USA Today 'So moving, so precisely observed... Erdrich uses her remarkable storytelling gifts to endow it with both emotional immediacy and the timeless power of fable.' New York Times

Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of American novelists. Born in 1954 in Minnesota, she grew up mostly in North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She is the author of six previous novels for adults, the first of which, 'Love Medicine', won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore called The Birchbark.