Over the course of one year, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted by its most annoying customer. - (Baker & Taylor)

In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors.

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. 

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* In her fifth self-narration, acclaimed Indigenous author Erdrich's latest is delightfully enhanced with personal meta-references, insightfully balancing the narrative's heavier events. Louise, the owner of Minneapolis' Birchbark Books (as is the author herself), goes on a just-before-pandemic-shutdown book tour—clearly a nod to Erdrich's 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Night Watchman. In this way, Erdrich relegates herself to the supporting cast; her protagonist is her stand-in's employee, Tookie, who once upon a time was found guilty of a crime that was more youthful, naïve greed than criminal intention. She survived imprisonment because of her seventh-grade English teacher's continuous supply of books. Working at Birchbark is a lifeline . . . until her most annoying-but-devoted customer, Flora, dies—and returns. Flora, who in life desperately invented Indigenous connections, is no friendly ghost. Amidst trying to get unhaunted, Tookie is overwhelmed with her angry sort-of-daughter who's returned home with an infant, and then her marriage starts to shake. COVID isolates and encroaches, George Floyd stops breathing, the city (and world) seethes and implodes, and Tookie fights for survival. Erdrich obviously knows her characters and (although she might not correctly pronounce ph?) her intimate fluency—literally and aurally—proves to be another gift. Not included in the recording but not to miss: Erdrich's "Totally Biased List of Tookie's Favorite Books." Copyright 2022 Booklist Reviews.