The Round House
Louise Erdrich's The Round House, winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction, is a searing coming-of-age novel set on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota in 1988. The story is told by Joe Coutts, looking back on the summer he turned thirteen, the summer his mother Geraldine was attacked at the round house, a sacred ceremonial site where tribal, state, and federal jurisdictions overlap in ways that make justice almost impossible to obtain. As Geraldine retreats into silence and trauma, Joe and his three friends, equal parts boys and Star Trek-quoting tricksters, set out to find the man who hurt her, with consequences none of them are old enough to understand. Erdrich uses the novel to expose a real legal nightmare: the narrow lines between tribal land and surrounding state land that for decades allowed non-Native men to commit crimes against Native women with near-impunity. But The Round House is never a polemic. It is a tender, funny, devastating portrait of a boy growing up too fast, of a family bound together by love and history, and of a community whose humor and resilience refuse to be defined only by what has been done to it. Erdrich's prose is luminous throughout, making this one of the essential novels of contemporary American literature.
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It is summer 1988 on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, and thirteen-year-old Joe Coutts is helping his father weed a tree when his mother comes home bloody. Tribal jurisdiction stops at the reservation line, and Joe and three friends start a quiet investigation around the old round house.
Yes. The Round House won the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction. Louise Erdrich also won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Night Watchman, making her one of the most-decorated American novelists of her generation.
Yes. The Round House is part of Louise Erdrich's loose Justice Trilogy alongside The Plague of Doves and LaRose. All three explore Ojibwe communities and questions of justice.
The Round House was written by Louise Erdrich, published in 2012 by HarperCollins Canada, Limited.
The Round House is 352 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Round House takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
The Round House is a standalone novel by Louise Erdrich, not part of a series.
The Round House is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
