This unnamed bookstore closely resembles a Minneapolis bookstore owned by Erdrich, not least because its owner, Louise, is a writer setting off on a book tour just as the pandemic is taking hold, at about the same time that Erdrich would've been promoting her last novel, "The Night Watchman," winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize. Now that I have a better idea, I will tell you this: I am an ugly woman." Well, there's considerably more to her than that, and much of "The Sentence" is devoted to figuring out what that is.Ĭonveniently, this endeavor is facilitated by Tookie's having spent her prison time reading voraciously, a learning binge begun with books supplied by her "seventh-grade teacher in the reservation school," Jackie, who happens to work in a Minneapolis bookstore that specializes in Native literature, where Tookie gets a job. But there are ghosts aplenty, and one in particular certainly spooks the novel's Ojibwe narrator, Tookie, whose nickname seems a quick take on her character, tough cookie.Īt the outset, Tookie tells us about having been in prison for 10 years for what seems an almost slapstick crime, committed when "for many reasons, I didn't know who I was yet. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.I guess you could call Louise Erdrich's new novel "The Sentence" a ghost story, though that implies a certain scary spookiness that the book does not possess. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook. 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 begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020.
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.
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. 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.
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