'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.

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children's books and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Love Medicine and LaRose received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Night Watchman won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. The Sentence was shortlisted for The Women's Prize for Fiction 2022. Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. A ghost lives in her creaky old house.