Despite its historical setting – the Dust Bowl of the 1930s – Karen Russell’s engrossing, hallucinatory drama of a Nebraska town in the throes of ecological breakdown feels achingly timely. At its heart is the question of memory and its suppression: of injustices that are deliberately forgotten only to rise again, of false memories handed solemnly down through generations, and of the vertiginous cost of allowing one view of history to prevail. Told from the point of view of a mystical “Prairie Witch” and her teenage acolyte, a repressed and lonely farmer, and a Black photographer tasked with documenting what remains of rural life, the story charts one small community’s battle to survive in a landscape it has destroyed, and with its own unstoppable demons.