Louise Erdrich's Sentence follows Tookie, a formerly incarcerated woman working at a Minneapolis bookstore during the pandemic and the George Floyd uprising. Haunted by the ghost of a difficult customer and grappling with the weight of 2020, the novel becomes a meditation on books, community, and the ways we survive impossible years. Erdrich blends the supernatural with the achingly real, creating a love letter to bookstores and the people who find refuge in them.

Because few novels have captured the strange, haunted feeling of recent years with such precision and heart.