When ghosts haunt a building, there are added complications when the living person is ‘difficult’. Tookie works at a bookstore in Minneapolis. Her most irritating client, Flora, dies unexpectedly. She is sad but looks forward to clear air in the bookstore now that she’s gone. Except …

Flora died on All Souls’ Day, ‘when the fabric between the worlds is thin as tissue and easily torn’. Flora still visits the bookstore. Tookie can hear her footsteps, orders are rearranged and books thrown to the floor. This bookstore specialises in Indigenous books and every member of staff are Native American. The narrative highlights the myths, mores and language of the culture. Flora claimed the same ethnicity. The book Flora was reading when she died contains mystical powers. Tookie tries (unsuccessfully) to destroy it.

Tookie practically raised herself, was conned into moving a dead body and sent to prison. Her husband’s daughter arrives with a new baby, Jarvis, just as the pandemic hits and George Floyd is murdered. Life is complicated enough without Flora’s presence. The staff try to remove her spirit, but that power ultimately rests with Tookie.

Multiple ‘sentences’ are at playing The Sentence: the deadly one in the book, Tookie’s prison time and the namechecking of contemporary fiction into the narrative. The story is mostly told from Tookie’s perspective, with humour, empathy and dawning insight. Erdrich’s writing is captivating and the resulting novel is utterly magnificent.

Reviewed by Bob Moore

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Karen Louise Erdrich was born June 7, 1954. She is an American author of novels, poetry, and children’s books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognised tribe of Ojibwe people.

Erdrich is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. She has written over 28 books in all, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children’s books. In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In November 2012, she received the National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House. She is a 2013 recipient of the Alex Awards. She was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction at the National Book Festival and in 2021, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Night Watchman.

She was married to author Michael Dorris and the two collaborated on a number of works. The couple separated in 1995.

She is also the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis that focuses on Native American literature and the Native community in the Twin Cities.