Ms. Erdrich, whose new novel, “LaRose,” comes out on Tuesday, was born in Minnesota and grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., where her mother, who is half French-American and half Ojibwe, and her father, a German-American, taught at a boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She attended Dartmouth as part of its first coed class; she was so quiet, she said, that people must have assumed she was stoned all the time.

For the last 20-odd years, Ms. Erdrich, 61, has spent most of her time in Minneapolis, which has a sizable Native American population. The unofficial center of that community is East Franklin Avenue, and Ms. Erdrich, shy and gracious, is a familiar presence there. One recent Friday, she stopped by the Minnesota American Indian Center, where she bought some beaded barrettes at the gift shop, and at a nearby gallery, All My Relations Arts, where her daughter Aza Erdrich, an artist, has a show of her paintings. Everyone recognized her, but no one made a fuss.

“Native people have lived here for generations, which is why I feel so at home,” she said. But they’re always in motion: “They’re always going back and forth from the city to their reservation — that’s how they keep their families together,” Ms. Erdrich said. “They put hundreds of thousands of miles on their cars.” Just then, she recognized one: The license plate said “OJIKWE,” blending two words to signify Ojibwe woman.

“LaRose” forms a sort of trilogy with Ms. Erdrich’s “The Plague of Doves” and National Book Award-winning “The Round House.” Like them, it is set in and around an Indian reservation that readers have come to know as her version of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County — a landscape where many of the same characters or their forebears show up again and again, and where the past is part of the present. Philip Roth said of Ms. Erdrich in an email: “She is, like Faulkner, one of the great American regionalists, bearing the dark knowledge of her place, as he did his.” He added, “She is by now among the very best of American writers.”