In her stunning and timely new novel, Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman’s resiliency through her relentless errors. Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, 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 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.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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