Signed
Future Home of the Living God
Signed first edition, 2017
Future Home of the Living God (2017) by Louise Erdrich is a speculative novel structured as a journal written by a pregnant woman to her unborn child. It is set in a near-future America where evolution has begun to reverse, and plants and animals are reverting to earlier forms. The government has declared a state of emergency, and pregnant women are being rounded up and confined. Cedar Hawk Songmaker, twenty-six, Ojibwe by birth and adopted by white Minneapolis liberals, is navigating both the crisis and her own unresolved search for her biological family when she starts her journal. Erdrich is best known for novels of the Ojibwe experience including The Round House, winner of the National Book Award, and The Plague of Doves, a Pulitzer finalist.
Signed copy. Signed by Erdrich on a specially bound-in page by the publisher.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. New York: Harper, 2017. ISBN: 9780062699435. #10144.
Fine in fine dust jacket with "signed copy" sticker on front cover.
Signed copy. Signed by Erdrich on a specially bound-in page by the publisher.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth. New York: Harper, 2017. ISBN: 9780062699435. #10144.
Fine in fine dust jacket with "signed copy" sticker on front cover.
Additional Details
Future Home of the Living God is written as a journal Cedar Hawk Songmaker keeps for her unborn child, addressed directly to the baby she is carrying through a world that has begun to come apart. The premise is that evolution has reversed. Plants and animals are reverting to earlier forms, and no one fully understands why. The government has declared a state of emergency and moved quickly to control what it can, which turns out to mean pregnant women. The state begins collecting pregnant women, holding them in detention facilities presented as care centers. Cedar is twenty-six, newly pregnant, and Ojibwe by birth though adopted by white Minneapolis liberals, and she is already in the middle of searching for her biological family when the crisis accelerates around her.
Cedar's journal is a way of leaving a record for someone who may inherit a very different world, or may not survive to inherit any world at all. Cedar is funny and self-aware in a way that cuts against the novel's apocalyptic weight, and Erdrich handles that tonal balance carefully throughout.
Cedar's Ojibwe identity and her relationship to her biological family on the Potts reservation runs parallel to the dystopian premise, offering her a sense of continuity the collapsed modern world cannot. The Ojibwe people have already survived multiple versions of what the novel's white characters are experiencing for the first time, with the loss of children, the disruption of family, and the systematic invasion of the state into private life.
The novel's religious dimension runs equally deep. Cedar thinks across multiple traditions simultaneously, and the Hildegard of Bingen epigraph signals early on that Erdrich is interested in the Word as something more than metaphor. The title itself comes from a church sign Cedar passes at one point. Future Home of the Living God was published the same year as The Power and Gather the Daughters, a notable cluster of feminist speculative fiction responding to the political climate of 2017. Of the three, Erdrich's is the most spiritually ambitious and the least interested in the structural norms of the dystopian genre, which is exactly what makes it worth reading alongside them.
Cedar's journal is a way of leaving a record for someone who may inherit a very different world, or may not survive to inherit any world at all. Cedar is funny and self-aware in a way that cuts against the novel's apocalyptic weight, and Erdrich handles that tonal balance carefully throughout.
Cedar's Ojibwe identity and her relationship to her biological family on the Potts reservation runs parallel to the dystopian premise, offering her a sense of continuity the collapsed modern world cannot. The Ojibwe people have already survived multiple versions of what the novel's white characters are experiencing for the first time, with the loss of children, the disruption of family, and the systematic invasion of the state into private life.
The novel's religious dimension runs equally deep. Cedar thinks across multiple traditions simultaneously, and the Hildegard of Bingen epigraph signals early on that Erdrich is interested in the Word as something more than metaphor. The title itself comes from a church sign Cedar passes at one point. Future Home of the Living God was published the same year as The Power and Gather the Daughters, a notable cluster of feminist speculative fiction responding to the political climate of 2017. Of the three, Erdrich's is the most spiritually ambitious and the least interested in the structural norms of the dystopian genre, which is exactly what makes it worth reading alongside them.