Hardcover, 416 pages
Published Oct. 11, 2021 by Harper.
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.
An unsteady book, wherever you may stumble in reading it I can at least say it was about to turn a corner to something else quirky unexpected and real, and the bulk of the story is true enough and heartfelt as far as I can recall and relate, a 2020 Covid & George Floyd indigenous bookstore memoir for Minneapolis.
