Louise Erdrich

Joe Coutts, thirteen years old, watches his mother return from a violent assault on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. The attacker cannot be prosecuted because of a jurisdictional tangle: the crime may have occurred on tribal land, federal land, or state land, and each has different rules about who can prosecute. Joe sets out to find justice himself.

Fourteen interconnected stories following members of the Kashpaw, Lamartine, Morrissey, and Nanapush families on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation from 1934 to 1984 — Erdrich's debut and the foundation of the great body of work that followed.

Based on the life of Erdrich's grandfather Patrick Gourneau, a Chippewa tribal council chairman who organised against House Concurrent Resolution 108 in 1953 — the legislation that would have terminated federal recognition of Native American tribes. Told alongside the story of Patrice, a young Turtle Mountain woman.

A murder in 1911 — a white family killed on their farm, blame assigned to three Ojibwe men who are lynched — haunts a North Dakota town for generations. Multiple narrators across several decades gradually reveal the truth behind the original murders and the lynching, and the consequences that have propagated through every family in the area.

Tookie, a Native American woman who works at a Minneapolis independent bookshop (based on Erdrich's own Birchbark Books), is haunted by the ghost of the most annoying customer who ever died. Set during 2020 — the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the uprising that followed in the city where Erdrich lives.

Set in North Dakota in the early 20th century, when the Ojibwe were losing their land to government allotment policies, Tracks follows the people of the Kashpaw and Pillager families through smallpox, starvation, and dispossession. Two alternating narrators — the old tribal figure Nanapush and the young woman Pauline — provide irreconcilable accounts of the same events.