By Louise Erdrich. The world is in crisis. Evolution has gone into reverse, affecting all creatures great and small, including the next generation of humans. Fewer babies - or their mothers - are surviving to full term and, of those babies born, many have been identified as belonging to a more primitive species of human. As governments take drastic action to limit the catastrophe, there has never been a more dangerous time to be having a baby.

Cedar Songmaker is pregnant. She is the adopted daughter of Minneapolis liberals. Determined to find out as much about her baby's make up as possible, she makes contact with her birth family on the Ojibwe reservation.

Episode 2
Cedar learns more about her birth family and their life on the Ojibwe reservation.

The author, Louise Erdrich, lives in Minnesota. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. She has also received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Writer: Louise Erdrich
Abridger: Jeremy Osborne
Reader: Cherrelle Skeete
Producer: Lisa Osborne

A Sweet Talk production for BBC Radio 4. Show less