Louise Erdrich won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2021 for The Night Watchman, and later that year she published The Sentence, which our Iron Book Discussion Group will read in November 2025.
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BOOK DESCRIPTION
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.
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Copies of The Sentence can be picked up from the Book Discussion Shelf on our first floor, and it’s also available to download through Overdrive/Libby as an ebook or an audiobook.
An in-person discussion of The Sentence will be held at the library on Tuesday, November 18, at 7:00 PM. No registration is required, so please join us if you’d like to be part of the discussion.
Published on October 17, 2025.
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