The Sentence

Louise Erdrich has become one of my favourite authors. The Sentence, published at the end of 2021, is partly a pandemic novel, partly about Black Lives Matter, partly about ghosts, and mostly about reckoning with the past.

Links with Erdrich's life seem clear -- Tookie, our narrator, works in a bookshop owned by an author called Louise which focuses on Native American and marginalised voices, just like Erdrich's own Birchbark Bookshop (Trump will probably try to shut it down soon). Tookie spent a decade in jail and she was first arrested by the man who is now her beloved husband. Her life is now safe and comfortable, but there are elements of her past that she has never come to terms with, signified by the fact that she is being haunted by the ghost of a former bookshop customer.

The Sentence covers a tumultuous year in Minneapolis as Covid sweeps the country and then the murder of George Floyd sparks protests, riots and brutality in the streets. Erdrich expertly weaves national and even global trauma with the deeply personal story of Tookie and her family. She must have written it so fast! As always, I'm struck with admiration for the way Erdrich combines the spiritual, the political and the domestic. The Sentence is a powerful and moving novel.