Author Louise Erdrich On 'LaRose'

In Louise Erdrich’s new novel LaRose, a man accidentally kills his neighbor’s son and makes an impossible sacrifice. She’s with us.

A Native American man out hunting aims and fires to take a deer near his neighbor’s property line. Instead, he finds a boy, the neighbor’s 5-year-old son lying covered in blood. The boy dies. The hunter gives his own son to the neighbor family to try to make good the loss. The "old way," he says. But novelist Louise Erdrich reminds us nothing is simple when old ways meet modern life. This hour On Point: Louise Erdrich on her new novel LaRose, and the Native American way in modern America.
-Tom Ashbrook

Louise Erdrich, author of 15 novels, including the 2012 National Book Award winning novel The Round House. Her latest is LaRose.

Louise Erdrich on Her New Novel, 'LaRose,' and the Psychic Territory of Native Americans — "Ms. Erdrich, whose new novel, “LaRose,” comes out on Tuesday, was born in Minnesota and grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., where her mother, who is half French-American and half Ojibwe, and her father, a German-American, taught at a boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs." (New York Times)

Kirkus Review — "After accidentally shooting his friend and neighbor’s young son, a man on a Native American reservation subscribes to “an old form of justice” by giving his own son, LaRose, to the parents of his victim." (Kirkus Reviews)

Louise Erdrich's 'LaRose' is everything you want a novel to be — "Erdrich is at her best when she weaves together stories from the past and present, illuminating the connections between generations, and sometimes between the spirit and corporeal worlds. And in this novel she does just that—not only with the generations of LaRoses but with other characters as well." (A.V. Club)