The Antelope Wife

A cavalry soldier named Scranton Roy takes part in the destruction of an Ojibwe village, follows a dog carrying a baby on its back into the plains, and nurses the child himself, an act of penance that will echo down five generations. Erdrich braids the descendants of that morning together across a century, from the northern plains to a Minneapolis of bakeries, bars and beadwork: the twin sisters who sew in patterns that decide the fates of others, Rozin Roy and her daughters, Frank Shawano and the German baker's recipe he spends his life trying to reconstruct, and Klaus Shawano, who steals a woman he sees at a powwow, a woman of the antelope people, and ties her to himself with the consequences one would expect. The narrative passes between voices, including a dog's. Erdrich's structure is beadwork itself: two sisters working in blue and red, the pattern only visible from a distance. It is a novel about theft as the founding act of a family and a country, about the marriages that follow from it, and about the impossibility of holding on to something wild by force.