The Round House

One Sunday in 1988, thirteen year old Joe Coutts learns that his mother has been the victim of a brutal attack by a man on their North Dakota reservation. Joe`s mother is traumatized and afraid. She takes to her bed, and refuses to talk to anyone - including the police; meanwhile his father, a tribal judge, endeavours to wrest justice from a situation that defies his keenest efforts; and young Joe`s moral and emotional landscape shifts on it`s child`s axis. Frustrated, confused and nursing a complicated fury, Joe sets out with his best friends Cappy, Zack and Angus in search of answers that might put his mother`s attacker behind bars and set his family`s world straight again. Or so he hopes.`The Round House`is a powerful and deeply humane story of a young boy pitched prematurely into an unjust adult world. It confirms Louise Erdrich as one of America`s most distinctive contemporary novelists.