The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author presents an unusual novel in which a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store’s most annoying customer. 150,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)

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

"Dazzling. . . . A hard-won love letter to readers and to booksellers, as well as a compelling story about how we cope with pain and fear, injustice and illness. One good way is to press a beloved book into another's hands. Read The Sentence and then do just that."—USA Today, Four Stars

In this New York Times bestselling 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. 

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* The many-hued, finely patterned weave of Erdrich's funny, evocative, painful, and redemptive ghost story includes strands of autobiography and even cameo appearances. The haunting occurs at Erdrich's actual Minneapolis bookstore, Birchbark Books. The unhappy spirit is that of a former customer, Flora, who irritated the Native staff members, especially Tookie, with her dubious claims of an Indigenous heritage. Tookie is supremely dedicated to her work, forever amazed, given her prison record, to have been hired by store owner Louise. The story of Tookie's body-snatching caper and subsequent horrifically long sentence is hilariously ludicrous and heartbreaking; the tale of how reading saved her life in prison is deeply affirming. A magnetizing narrator, Tookie seems tough and ornery, but she is actually quite "porous" emotionally and suffused with love for her tribal leader husband, Pollux, in spite of their complicated past. As Tookie tries to appease Flora, she and her bookstore colleagues—a teacher, an historian, and an artist—confront historic ghosts from the violent seizing of the land by white settlers as the fear and sorrow of the COVID-19 pandemic takes hold, and the city ignites in the wake of George Floyd's murder by a Minneapolis police officer. Erdrich's insights into what her city experienced in 2020 are piercing; all her characters are enthralling, and her dramatization of why books are essential to our well-being is resounding.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Erdrich's unique take on the first COVID year and the power of books will be on countless TBR lists. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

Opening on All Souls' Day 2019 and closing on All Souls' Day 2020, thus embracing a year of pandemic and protest, this latest novel from National Book Award winner Erdrich chronicles the experiences of an Ojibwe woman named Tookie who works at an independent bookstore in Minneapolis after her release from prison. Her life changes when the ghost of a recently deceased customer begins haunting the bookstore, pushing her and Ojibwe colleague Asema toward painful personal revelations with deep historical resonance. Meanwhile, Tookie launches a complicated relationship with Pollux, the tribal police officer who had arrested her years previously and has always cared about her. With a 150,000-copy first printing.