From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich comes a richly layered novel that explores identity, exploitation, and how the burdens of history still shape our lives today.

'Louise Erdrich is my favourite writer . . . No one is better than Erdrich at creating an entire world and all the people who live there, past, present and future' Ann Patchett, Evening Standard



'Louise Erdrich is the rarest kind of writer, as compassionate as she is sharp-sighted' Anne Tyler


A wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman's relentless errors.

Tookie works as a bookseller in a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis. When the store's most annoying customer dies on All Souls' Day, her ghost simply refuses to leave the store. Tookie, who landed the job after being released from years of wrongful incarceration, 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.

'As the owner of a store herself, Erdrich knows whereof she writes, and her off-beat ghost story is in part a love letter to books and the shops that sell them. It also captures with compelling fidelity a year of personal and national dread and anguish - yet still pulls off a happy ending'