A ‘prairie witch’ who can remove unwanted memories is at the centre of this 1930s-set parable about climate refugees, amnesia and the ethnic cleansing of Native peoples

The latest novel from Karen Russell, author of the highly acclaimed Swamplandia!, is set in a 1930s Nebraska town called Uz, after the home of the biblical Job. The name is apt; it’s the time of the Dust Bowl, when the Great Plains states of the US suffered drought and colossal dust storms that blighted agriculture and turned a generation of farmers into climate refugees.

The book has four protagonists, all with some connection to uncanny powers. The Antidote of the title is a “prairie witch” with the ability to take away people’s unwanted memories and hold them against the day the owner is ready to remember. Harp Oletsky is a farmer who finds his land is miraculously spared from the catastrophic “Black Sunday” dust storm; in its wake, the sky is blue over his fields alone, and they fill with healthy wheat. His teenage niece, Dell, is dealing with the murder of her mother by obsessively playing basketball and apprenticing herself to the Antidote as a trainee witch. Cleo Allfrey is a black photographer, sent to Nebraska by the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration to document the suffering of farmers. She buys a camera in a local pawn shop that turns out to have uncanny powers of its own: its photographs show scenes from potential futures and forgotten pasts. The novel also has brief sections from the perspectives of a haunted scarecrow and a stray cat.