Miami native Karen Russell ’s critically acclaimed 2011 novel “Swamplandia!” propelled her into the spotlight. Set among several unusual theme parks in the Everglades and focused on a loving but damaged family, it wove together Florida history and magic realism — fans may remember the strawberry-red alligator and the girl who married a ghost — to create an irresistible tale.Russell’s new novel, “The Antidote,” takes a similar approach, setting its remarkable story in a real time and place, in this case the Dust Bowl that ravaged the American prairies during the Great Depression almost a century ago.One of the novel’s four main characters is Asphodel Oletsky, called Dell. Orphaned as a child when her unmarried mother was murdered, Dell has been sent to live with her uncle, Harp Oletsky, a middle-aged farmer who’s another main character. His family came to Nebraska from Poland, part of the vast wave of immigration that drove the United States’ expansion.Harp is a hard-working, by-the-books guy who keeps his emotions under wraps, and he finds his independent-minded teenage niece something of a trial (as well as a painful reminder of his lost sister). But the two bond over basketball. It’s Dell’s obsession — until, that is, she meets the book’s title character.The Antidote is the professional name of a woman whose real name we won’t learn for many chapters. Her first-person narration drives a significant portion of the book, and in her Russell creates another uniquely unforgettable character.The Antidote is what is known as a prairie witch, or a Vault — a woman who is paid to enter a trance state and hear her customer’s private confessions. It’s considered a valuable service because afterward, the client has no more memory of the thing confessed — and neither does the Vault.“Sins and crimes, first and last times, nights of unspeakable horror and dewdrop blue mornings — or who knew what my customers had transferred from their bodies into mine? These were only my guesses,” The Antidote tells us.“I disappeared into a spacious blankness during my transfers. A prairie witch’s body is a room for rent. A vault to store the things people cannot stand to know, or bear to forget.”Want your memory back? For another fee, the Vault can retrieve it. It’s a sign of Russell’s marvelous craft that she makes this imagined occupation seem entirely believable, even mundane.But The Antidote, we learn, can’t bury all her own memories. Like Dell, she’s an orphan, and she’s even more bereft after becoming pregnant as a teenager, only to have her baby son stolen from her in a bleak home for unwed mothers. Much of her narration is addressed (sometimes heartbreakingly) to her lost boy, about whom she remembers everything.When Dell meets The Antidote, she is gripped by the desire to become a Vault herself — which is possible only by learning it firsthand from another Vault, a role The Antidote has no interest in assuming.The fourth main character, Cleo Allfrey, is a photographer working (for a tiny paycheck) for the Resettlement Agency, an arm of the New Deal. She’s been sent out to the Dust Bowl to, as her boss writes in one of his many bossy letters, “tell the story of human erosion.”Her life will intersect, in ways that amaze her, with those of the other main characters in their hometown, the tiny village of Uz, Nebraska. If that name rings a bell — if the towering black dust storms Russell evokes so terrifyingly remind you of something — pay attention. And there’s also a sentient scarecrow.But, as Harp explains, the immigrants who founded the town borrowed its name from the Bible. The land of Uz was the home of Job, the man whom God blessed with everything — and then tested by taking it all away.When Harp tries to talk to Dell about this, she declares, “Uz sounds like a sneeze, Uncle.”“You think this is a funny story?” Harp asks her. “Look outside the window, girl. Look what chapter and verse we are living in.”But there are wonders outside that window as well, and journeys into the human heart that illuminate America’s history, and its present.Here are five memorable historical novels set in different eras of American history. “Beloved” by Toni Morrison “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann “The Night Watchman” by Louise Erdrich “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead