• With its contemporary urban setting (Minneapolis) and characters, and its straightforward narrative, Shadow Tag s a departure for Louise Erdrich and is sure to appeal to her core audience and new readers.

• Erdrich’s last novel, The Plague of Doves, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and hit numerous national bestseller lists, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, and Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and was an independent bestseller.

• Harper Perennial will publish the trade paperback edition of Erdrich’s recent short story collection, The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008, in January 2010.

• The author’s award-winning novel Love Medicine will be a selection of the National Endowment of the Arts’ Big Read in 2010.

“Here is the most telling fact: you wish to posess me.
Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.”

When Irene America discovers that her husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret “Blue Notebook,” as much the truth about her life and her marriage as the “Red Diary”—hidden where he can find it—is a manipulative farce. Alternating between these two records, complemented by unflinching third-person narration, Shadow Tag is an eerily gripping read.

When the novel opens, Irene is resuming work on her doctoral thesis about George Catlin, the 19th-century painter whose Native American subjects often regarded his portraits with suspicious wonder. Gil, who gained notoriety as an artist through his emotionally revealing portraits of his wife—work that is adoring, sensual, and humiliating, even shocking—realizes that his fear of losing Irene may force him to create the defining work of his career.

Meanwhile, Irene and Gil fight to keep up appearances for their three children: 14-year old genius Florian, who escapes his family’s unraveling with joints and a stolen bottle of wine; Riel, their only daughter, an 11-year old feverishly planning to preserve her family, no matter what disaster strikes; and sweet kindergartener Stoney, who was born, his parents come to realize, at the beginning of the end.

As her home increasingly becomes a place of violence and secrets, and she drifts into alcoholism, Irene moves to end her marriage. But her attachment to Gil is filled with shadowy need and delicious ironies. In brilliantly controlled prose, Shadow Tag fearlessly explores the complex nature of love, the fluid boundaries of identity, and one family’s struggle for survival and redemption.