Love medicine

Love Medicine is the debut novel of the American writer Louise Erdrich, first published in 1984 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, and revised and expanded in 1993 and 2009. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1984.

The book follows five interconnected Ojibwe families, the Kashpaws, Lamartines, Morrisseys, Pillagers and Lazarres, who live on the fictional reservations of Little No Horse and Hoopdance and in the cities of Minnesota and North Dakota. Erdrich tells their history in chapters that jump across six decades, from the 1930s to the 1980s, and each chapter is spoken in a different voice, first-person or closely limited, so that the reader meets the same lives more than once from different angles.

Marie Lazarre, Nector Kashpaw and Lulu Lamartine are at the centre of the book's long triangle, and their children and grandchildren carry its consequences as the families move off the reservation, into work, marriages and trouble, and back again. A pair of chapters at the midpoint of the book converge on a single day in the lives of three people caught in that triangle.