This dazzlingly inventive novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Night Watchman combines a deliciously witty ghost story set in a Minneapolis bookshop – haunted by its most annoying customer – with a powerful meditation on the reality of the global pandemic and the collateral damage of systemic racism.
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022
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.
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9781472156990
Number of pages: 400
Weight: 650 g
Dimensions: 238 x 160 x 38 mm
Louise Erdrich is the rarest kind of writer, as compassionate as she is sharp-sighted - Anne Tyler
A novel that reckons with ghosts - of both specific people but also the shadows resulting from America's violent, dark habits - Kirkus (starred review)
Scintillating . . . More than a gripping ghost story, The Sentence offers profound insights into the effects of the global pandemic and the collateral damage of systemic racism. It adds up to one of Erdrich's most . . . illuminating works to date - Publishers Weekly (Starred review)
Erdrich is one of the greatest living American writers - Guardian
The poet laureate of the contemporary Native American experience - Mail on Sunday
No one can break your heart and fill it with light all in the same book - sometimes in the same paragraph - quite like Louise Erdrich - Tampa Bay Times
'Strange, enchanting and funny: a work about motherhood, doom, regret and the magic - dark, benevolent and every shade in between - of words on paper' - The New York Times
It is just a favour that Tookie wants to do for her grieving friend, admittedly, a well-paid favour since stealing the body of the lately deceased boyfriend can solve all of Tookie's financial problems. Of... More
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich is a rich and witty contemporary ghost story. Set in an independent bookstore in Minneapolis between November 2019 to 2020 which is being haunted by a customer. Flora died on All Saints’... More
The question of how much time needs to pass before seismic, era-defining events are able to be successfully captured on the page is surely one many writers are grappling with today – Erdrich proves there’s no such... More
Please sign in to write a review
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?