The Sentence

By Louise Erdrich,

Book cover of The Sentence

Book description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022
PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE NIGHT WATCHMAN

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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…

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Why read it?

5 authors picked The Sentence as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I love so many things about this book, starting with the title (double-entendre!) and the setting (bookstore!).

I love the snippets of real life (e.g., it’s the author’s bookstore). And then there’s the ghost, Flora. Erdrich does such a good job with Flora. This is not the movie Ghostbusters and it’s not the TV show Ghosts. Flora is just an unseen character, a former customer who keeps hanging out in the bookstore in the time of Covid. Erdrich weaves both Covid and the ghost into the story so smoothly—the book is not about either one of them, but they are…

From Ellen's list on magical books for realists.

The book is sparkling with a great sense of humor, and it starts off as a cute and slightly ghoulish ghost story set in a local bookstore which is haunted by a deceased customer, an annoying white woman who was a rude imposter of Native American heritage.

Published in 2021, the story is quickly outrun by the historical context: The supernatural apparitions are now parallel to a weird airborne virus that shuts down public life; George Floyd is murdered, and protests of the Black Life Matters movement engulf Minneapolis.

The book becomes witness to the emotional effects of 2020 events…

Louise Erdrich’s most recent novel continues the trend of her recent work of venturing into different kinds of novels. In recent years, she has published dystopian fiction and fiction hueing closely to her family’s personal history.

The Sentence is set in Erdrich’s Minneapolis-based bookstore, Birchbark Books, during the pandemic and George Floyd protests, and, though clearly fiction, it has the feel of a first-person dispatch from our recent tumultuous times.

It is also a ghost story, and it brings together Erdrich’s trademark insightful characterization with a willingness to consider the world as a mysterious place that is sometimes dangerous, sometimes…

Let Evening Come

By Yvonne Osborne,

Book cover of Let Evening Come

Yvonne Osborne Author Of Let Evening Come

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world. 

Yvonne's book list on immersive coming-of-age fiction with characters struggling to find themselves amidst the isolation and bigotry in Indigenous, rural, and minority communities

What is my book about?

After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie’s aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program.

Stefan promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his story, has grown sympathetic to his cause and complicit in his pushback against prejudiced accusations. Their mutual attraction is stymied when Stefan’s older brother, Joachim, who stayed behind, becomes embroiled in the resistance, and Stefan is compelled to return to Canada. Sadie, concerned for his safety, impulsively follows on a trajectory doomed by cultural misunderstanding and oncoming winter.

Let Evening Come

By Yvonne Osborne,

What is this book about?

After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through the pitfalls of young adulthood.
Hundreds of miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are forced off their land by multinational energy companies and flawed treaties. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie's aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program.
Stefan, whose own father died in prison while on a hunger strike, promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his…


Could there be more star-crossed lovers? Pollux must arrest Tookie after she's tricked into driving a man's body over state lines, inadvertently transporting drugs as well. 

After she serves her time, they connect through kindness and care, and marry. She works in a bookstore, haunted by annoying customer Flora. Tookie's convinced that Flora was killed by a powerful sentence in the last book she'd read. The word "sentence" becomes a clever device, connoting Tookie's incarceration, as well as being implicated in Flora's demise.
There are many layers to The Sentence, with themes of indigenous people, marital love, mothers who are…

From Carol's list on star-crossed soul mates.

Louise Erdrich, herself, epitomizes what I love most about reading her stories.

She inspires resilience and change in facing adversity, and does so with humor, laser beam intelligence, and a depth of understanding humanity that is breathtaking, all the while bringing together disparate ideas with the ease of a magician.

As an avid reader of her writings about Native American life, I usually consider her most recent fiction to be my favorite, which is how I feel about The Sentence. Erdrich highlights the non-fictional horrors of 2019-2020 with the COVID pandemic, George Floyd murder, and violent protests.

Her fabulously imagined…

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