The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Published 2021

Available in the Richland Library collection in print, eBook, and Audiobook formats.

Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from  November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls’ Day, but she simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading “with murderous attention,” must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs  in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning. 

The Sentence begins on All Souls’ Day 2019 and ends on All Souls’ Day 2020. Its mystery and  proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written. 

“THE SENTENCE is a novel that reckons with ghosts—of both specific people but also the  shadows resulting from America’s violent, dark habits.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)