One of those books you can’t wait to get home to. Funny and tragic in equal measure, The Mighty Red is a quixotic look at how we experience love and loss differently.

Erdrich is a celebrated Native American author, with both a Pulitzer and National Book award and it’s not hard to see why.

Her characters are many and memorable: There is the sensationally named lead, Kismet Poe. Floundering in life but stoic in her hardship she falls into a lacklustre marriage with Gary Geist, the traumatised but at least wealthy son of a local farming monopoly. Marriage does not stop Kismet from a continuing dalliance with the funny and awkward Hugo, a sex-obsessed bookseller who dreams of the kind of life he reads about. All have just finished school and are searching for a way forward in a town with few options available. The adults aren’t doing much better. Kismet’s father is a high-falutin out of work theatre type who turns his acting abilities to something a little more lucrative. One can’t help but cheer him on as he flees to the open road.

The Mighty Red is set in rural North Dakota, where the production of sugar-beets is both hallowed and historic. Once a fertile valley, where Kismet’s family had a small but abundant property, the farms are now enormous, sustained on artificial nutrients and buoyed by glyphosate. It is a familiar story of individual ignorance, corporate malfeasance and the willingness to do what it takes to make ends meet.

Erdrich touches on many sore points in this novel, which give it great depth, but thanks to her terrific humour it doesn’t weigh heavily. It is a timely story, a reminder that we are capable of creating conditions of fertility and abundance in our personal relationships, and in our relationship to the land.

– Sally