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...

Returning to her childhood home after nearly two decades and reeling from upheavals in her world, Noel Post inherits her father's bookstore and begins receiving letters from an anonymous source, each one containing thoughts and lessons about her life and her future, and as she begins to reacquaint herself with the bookstore and the people she left behind, Noel starts to unravel the reality of her painful childhood and the truth about her family.