The Sentence

The Ghost

Flora is dead. She was, when alive, a regular at Birchbark Books — the real Minneapolis bookshop that Louise Erdrich owns, where this novel is nominally set — and she was the kind of customer who drove the booksellers to distraction: appropriating Native identity, lecturing the Native American staff about Native American culture, returning books after reading them and demanding refunds. Now she is haunting the shop, and specifically haunting Tookie.

Tookie is a Ojibwe woman with a criminal past (she was sentenced for smuggling a body across state lines, which has a story behind it) who has built a good life: a husband, Pollux, whom she loves; a job at the bookshop; a community. The haunting is an inconvenience and then something more.

2020 in Minneapolis

Erdrich began writing The Sentence in early 2020 and was working on it when George Floyd was murdered eight blocks from her bookshop on May 25. She incorporated what she witnessed directly — the uprising, the burning, the grief and rage and solidarity of the Minneapolis summer — and the result is as immediate an account of that specific time and place as fiction has produced.

The pandemic, the murder, the ghost, the bookshop: these elements should not cohere and largely do. What holds them together is Tookie’s voice — practical, funny, loving, clear-eyed about her own history and uncertain about the ghost.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Sentence apart: Tookie is one of Erdrich’s most immediately engaging narrators — funny, warm, and honest about her own contradictions; The bookshop setting allows Erdrich to embed an enormous amount of literary commentary naturally; and The 2020 material — pandemic, Floyd’s murder, the uprising — is handled with documentary immediacy rather than retrospective processing. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Sentence give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Bookselling is a form of community — the relationships between booksellers and regular customers are their own kind of attachment. Living through an event of the magnitude of 2020 — pandemic and racial uprising simultaneously — requires narrative processing that documentary alone cannot provide. Haunting is what happens when something that should be resolved stays open. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Louise Erdrich’s prose in The Sentence is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The ghost story mechanics are less interesting than the realist sections. Less mythologically rich than Erdrich’s North Dakota novels — the Minneapolis setting produces a different register. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Erdrich readers who want her most recent novel, and book-lovers who want fiction about the experience of working in and loving an independent bookshop.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Erdrich’s most immediate novel: a ghost story, a bookshop novel, and a real-time reckoning with the year Minneapolis burned.

Reading Guides

• The Night Watchman — Full Review
• The Round House — Full Review

Publication and Louise Erdrich’s Career

The Sentence was published in November 2021. Louise Erdrich set the novel in her own Minneapolis bookshop, Birchbark Books, during the events of 2020 — the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, whose death triggered protests that transformed the city — making it the most directly autobiographical and topically immediate of her novels.

Erdrich won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Night Watchman (2020) and the National Book Award for Fiction for The Round House (2012), establishing her over four decades as the most honoured living Native American novelist. Her central subject across most of her fiction — the Chippewa (Ojibwe) community of North Dakota and Minnesota, their historical traumas and contemporary lives — is treated with a combination of community intimacy and structural ambition that critics have compared to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels.

The novel’s ghost — the troublesome spirit of a difficult customer named Flora, who haunts the bookshop after her death — allows Erdrich to address the question of who owns and tells Indigenous stories. Flora’s obsessive appropriation of Native culture in life, and her possessive haunting of the bookshop after death, concentrates the novel’s cultural politics in a single comic-horror figure. The bookshop setting also allows Erdrich to reflect on the pandemic’s effect on independent bookselling, community gathering, and the physical book as an object.

Erdrich set the novel during October 2019 to November 2021, incorporating the COVID-19 pandemic and the Minneapolis protests following George Floyd’s murder directly into the narrative — events she lived through as owner of Birchbark Books, located miles from where Floyd was killed. The novel was written and published while those events were still unresolved.

Tookie as Narrator

Tookie, Erdrich’s narrator — a former drug courier who discovers books in prison, works in Birchbark Books, and is haunted by the ghost of a customer who died — is among Erdrich’s most direct authorial proxies: a woman who found literature late, who loves it with the intensity of someone who came to it by accident, and who believes, provisionally, in its power to hold things together. The ghost that haunts her is the ghost of a reader — someone defined, finally, by what she loved to read.