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 & afraid. She takes to her bed & 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; & young Joe's moral & emotional landscape shifts on its child's axis. Frustrated confused & nursing a complicated fury Joe sets out with his best friends Cappy Zack & Angus in search of answers that might put his mother's attacker behind bars
- & set his family's world straight again. Or so he hopes. The Round House is a powerful & 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.