About four months into the composition of her outstanding 14th novel, The Round House, award-winning author Louise Erdrich was diagnosed with breast cancer.

"I just never thought anything like this would happen to me," Erdrich says during a call to her home outside Minneapolis, where she lives with her second husband and their 11-year-old daughter. Another daughter, Persia, lives nearby and works at Birchbark Books, the independent bookstore Erdrich owns with her sister in Minneapolis. During her illness, a third daughter came home from New York to help care for the household. "There's no breast cancer in my family, and I've always been incredibly healthy. It was picked up by accident by my wonderful doctor, who found what hardly showed up on a mammogram."

Lucky thing. The cancer turned out to be a very aggressive, fast-growing strain, but caught at such an early stage, it was entirely treatable. Erdrich is now "very well," she says. "I was very lucky with this."

Still, in the first days of her treatment Erdrich did not feel so lucky. She wondered if she'd be able to write through it. Then, remarkably, she entered one of the most productive periods of her writing career. Not only did she work intensively on The Round House, but she wrote a completely new version of her seventh novel, The Antelope Wife, and a new children's book, Chickadee, all of which are arriving on booksellers' shelves in summer and early fall.

"I think it's because I played the C card," Erdrich says, laughing. Throughout the conversation, she laughs easily and frequently, seeming very much at home with herself. "I suddenly had a good excuse to get out of just about anything anyone asked of me. It's ridiculous! Why should a person have to go through cancer in order to just say I've got to stay home and write? But that seems to be what happened."

Since she made her name with Love Medicine and The Beet Queen in the 1980s, Erdrich has been writing about the social and spiritual lives of contemporary Native Americans. Her brush with cancer seems to have sharpened both the emotional and narrative drive of her latest novel, The Round House, which tells the riveting story of 13-year-old Joe Coutts coming of age on a North Dakota reservation in 1988.

In Edrich's powerful new novel, a mother's rape launches her son's search for justice.

"It's always hard to tell what piece of yourself goes into a book," Erdrich says. "My particular fear was of leaving my children. As a parent you're not really afraid for yourself, you're just afraid to leave them. I'm never helpless around my children, but I was helpless then. And I sensed nothing but them wanting to help me. My memories are of laughing very hard, reading funny notes, eating wonderful food that my daughters prepared and holding their hands. The sharpness of the emotion I felt may have helped me in understanding the characters. It's a very character-driven book, and it's very much about emotions between Joe and his mother."

It gives little away to say that in the first pages of The Round House, Joe's mother, Geraldine Coutts, is brutally raped by a white man in a savage act of vengeance. Traumatized, Geraldine withdraws into silence, leaving her husband, a tribal judge, with a kind of roiling, helpless grief and anger, and Joe with the need to resolve profound questions about justice, revenge and the inexplicable nature of evil.

Justice, Erdrich says, was the seminal issue for The Round House. "Right now, tribal governments can't prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on their land," she says. In the novel's afterword, she writes about the appalling numbers of non-Indian men who rape Indian women on tribal lands and escape prosecution because of jurisdictional issues. "I've known about this for a long time but it's an injustice I never knew how to write about. I didn't want to write a polemical piece. Every time I'd talk about the novel, I'd say it's about jurisdiction and—YAWN, people's eyes would glaze over. I thought, I have to find a way to tell this story that doesn't make them completely lose consciousness."

Readers of The Round House will find themselves fully alert and paying rapt attention to the story. This is one of Erdrich's most suspenseful novels. "I wanted to make it a book with suspense," Erdrich says, "so I keep answering questions all through the book. There's always something unanswered."

But, as she hopes, it is the vibrancy of Erdrich's characters that give this book its liveliness. Joe and his three valiant boyhood pals ride around the reservations on their bicycles, longing for girls and getting into the minor, sometimes comical scrapes young teenage boys do, even while they are forced to confront daunting moral challenges.

"I grew up in a small town where your bike was your means of freedom," Erdrich says when asked about how she entered the mindset of her boy characters. "My brothers did crazy things, my husband is one of many brothers, and my daughters were always great pals with boys. So I just knew and know a great many 13- and 14-year-old boys. That age always gets to me. I know boys of that age who really hide their tenderness for their mothers, and I wanted to write something about that because it's so mysterious: that simultaneous feeling of wanting to break away and wanting to protect them. Having gone through life with my daughters and their friends, I just have this sense of a great purity of courage in those boys. They haven't thought it out, but they know exactly what's right."

The spiritual part of Joe's journey involves a mix of Native spiritual practices and Catholicism. Joe assists tribal elders with their sweat lodge ceremonies, but he and his friends are fascinated by Father Travis, a virile young priest and an Iraq War veteran. "I've always had a different sort of priest in every book. This priest is the first one who has a sense of irony and who has really questioned his own life," Erdrich says.

"The Ojibwe people's earliest contact with non-Natives was with the Jesuits, so there's a long history of entwinement of the cultures," she points out. "But it's always up to the individual priest how much he'll allow the traditionalists into his belief system. It's anathema to the church itself to admit the truth or goodness of any other form of religion, especially a non-Christian religion. But priests are sometimes hit over the head by the fact that they're trying to teach spirituality to an intensely spiritual people, and they're trying to take their spirituality away from them in order to force another form of spirituality upon them. Father Travis has a lot of respect for traditional people, he tells Joe. He has, I guess, a very masculine, soldierly view of the world and is willing to talk to Joe on a level that I don't think most priests really would."

Joe and his friends come of age discovering the existence of injustice and real evil in the world. But Erdrich's own vision has a wider embrace. Surprisingly, The Round House is often laugh-out-loud funny. This is because the elders, who have been through their own torments and sorrows, joke about everything, especially about sex.

"It's a relief to be around elders because they can say anything," Erdrich says. "They delight in embarrassing young people. They don't have to hold anything back, and there's just a lot of sexual joking that elders can do that young people aren't really supposed to. I guess part of me wants to joke on that level too but I'm not quite allowed to yet. So those parts were a lot of fun to write.

"When I'm with older relatives, we just laugh nonstop. I laugh a lot with people my age, but not with the kind of merciless hilarity that comes in looking back. It's an intense sort of freedom that maybe only comes to those who are lucky enough to be that old and be able to see back into the crazy hearts of the young."

And that is the real wonder of Louise Erdrich's newest novel. It vividly portrays both the deep tragedy and crazy comedy of life.

Set on a fictional Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, Louise Erdrich's chilling novel, The Round House, focuses on a Native American boy's efforts to make sense of the world after a brutal crime. Joe is 13 when his mother, Geraldine, is raped near a sacred structure—the round house of the book's title. The main suspect is white. When questions involving tribal courts and the prosecution of non-Natives complicate the legal proceedings, Joe seeks justice himself. Now an adult, he recounts this remarkable story after the fact, revisiting a turning point in his adolescence. With his girl-obsessed buddies, Joe goes on adventurous bike rides, plays the sleuth in hopes of finding his mother's attacker and spends time with eccentric Ojibwe elders. Native American traditions contrast sharply with contemporary events, just one of many contradictions Joe struggles to reconcile. Winner of the National Book Award, this tightly plotted novel offers numerous discussion topics, including questions about gender, race and justice.

BRANCHING OUT
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, by National Book Award-winning author Andrew Solomon, is a groundbreaking exploration of parenthood and its attendant complexities. Solomon put 10 years of work into this expansive book, focusing on families with children who are "exceptional"—who suffer from autism, Down syndrome or schizophrenia, who are transgender or child prodigies, or even criminals. The results make for fascinating reading, as Solomon shares their experiences—the day-to-day difficulties and little victories that come with raising an outside-the-norm kid. Further enriching the narrative is the author's own story. Solomon, who is dyslexic, says his condition posed no problems for his open-minded parents. It was his gayness that proved a challenge—for them and for him. This is a big-hearted book about the process of parenting, the meaning of personal identity and the nature of love. Because of the narrative's length and complexity, reading groups should consider extending their reading and/or discussion time for the book.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
Acclaimed author Junot Díaz returns with This Is How You Lose Her, a terrific short story collection that focuses on an inexhaustible topic: love. Featuring Yunior, an über-dude from the Dominican Republic, whom fans will recognize from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the collection explores the ways in which love influences the contemporary male. In "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars," Yunior's girlfriend, Magda, leaves him after she learns of his unfaithfulness through a letter. "Miss Lora" features a teenage Yunior who's awakening to sex and who reflects on his difficult father and macho brother and the ways in which he resembles both. "The Cheater's Guide to Love" finds Yunior settled in Boston, writing books and recovering from yet another breakup. In these electrifying stories, Díaz also explores the immigrant experience with spot-on insight. This exhilarating collection was nominated for the National Book Award, and it's easy to see why.

Erdrich continues the trilogy begun with The Plague of Doves with the story of an Ojibwe woman named Geraldine Coutts who is ruthlessly attacked one summer morning in 1988. Because she refuses to speak about the event, her husband, Bazil, and their 13-year-old son, Joe, try to answer the most basic questions, e.g., was the attacker Indian or white? Frustrated, Joe rounds up three friends and hunts for the truth himself. Erdrich is such a natural that one almost forgets how good she is; with a 100,000-copy first printing and a seven-city tour.

Set on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota in 1988, Erdrich's 14th novel focuses on 13-year-old Joseph. After his mother is brutally raped yet refuses to speak about the experience, Joe must not only cope with her slow physical and mental recovery but also confront his own feelings of anger and helplessness. Questions of jurisdiction and treaty law complicate matters. Doubting that justice will be served, Joe enlists his friends to help investigate the crime. VERDICT Erdrich skillfully makes Joe's coming-of-age both universal and specific. Like many a teenage boy, he sneaks beer with his buddies, watches Star Trek: The Next Generation, and obsesses about sex. But the story is also ripe with detail about reservation life, and with her rich cast of characters, from Joe's alcoholic and sometimes violent uncle Whitey and his former-stripper girlfriend Sonja, to the ex-marine priest Father Travis and the gleefully lewd Grandma Thunder, Erdrich provides flavor, humor, and depth. Joe's relationship with his father, Bazil, a judge, has echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird, as Bazil explains to his son why he continues to seek justice despite roadblocks to prosecuting non-Indians. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 4/23/12.]—Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Erdrich, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, sets her newest (after Shadow Tag) in 1988 in an Ojibwe community in North Dakota; the story pulses with urgency as she probes the moral and legal ramifications of a terrible act of violence. When tribal enrollment expert Geraldine Coutts is viciously attacked, her ordeal is made even more devastating by the legal ambiguities surrounding the location and perpetrator of the assault—did the attack occur on tribal, federal, or state land? Is the aggressor white or Indian? As Geraldine becomes enveloped by depression, her husband, Bazil (the tribal judge), and their 13-year-old son, Joe, try desperately to identify her assailant and bring him to justice. The teen quickly grows frustrated with the slow pace of the law, so Joe and three friends take matters into their own hands. But revenge exacts a tragic price, and Joe is jarringly ushered into an adult realm of anguished guilt and ineffable sadness. Through Joe's narration, which is by turns raunchy and emotionally immediate, Erdrich perceptively chronicles the attack's disastrous effect on the family's domestic life, their community, and Joe's own premature introduction to a violent world. Agent: Andrew Wiley. (Oct.)