Future Home of the Living God
Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God is a near future dystopia framed as a journal Cedar Hawk Songmaker is keeping for her unborn child. The world's evolutionary clock has begun reversing, with newborns showing primitive traits and species reverting toward ancient forms, and a panicked United States government collapses into a theocratic regime that begins rounding up pregnant women into state birthing centers. Cedar, a young Ojibwe woman raised by white liberal parents in Minneapolis, picks this terrifying moment to track down her birth family on the Ojibwe reservation, both to understand her own heritage and to prepare a record for the child she may not be allowed to keep. Erdrich blends the pacing of a domestic thriller with the spiritual scope of her literary fiction, treating the narrator's relationships with her two mothers, her partner, and the unraveling natural world as equally sacred. The result is a Handmaid's Tale style dystopia rooted firmly in Indigenous cosmology.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Future Home of the Living God
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Evolution appears to be reversing, and the United States quietly becomes a state that monitors pregnant women. A young Ojibwe-raised writer learns she is pregnant and starts a journal for the child she may not get to keep.
Yes. Future Home of the Living God is Louise Erdrich's 2017 dystopian novel about evolutionary regression and a state that begins controlling pregnant women. It is often compared to The Handmaid's Tale, though it is set in present-day America from an Indigenous perspective.
Future Home of the Living God is a standalone, separate from Louise Erdrich's main interconnected Ojibwe novels (Love Medicine, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and others). It stands apart in tone and setting.
Future Home of the Living God was written by Louise Erdrich, published in 2017 by HarperCollins Canada, Limited.
Future Home of the Living God is 288 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Future Home of the Living God takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Future Home of the Living God is a standalone novel by Louise Erdrich, not part of a series.
Future Home of the Living God is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.