Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence is set in a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis which is haunted by Flora, who died on All Souls’ Day at simply won’t leave the store. After years of incarceration that she survived by reading, Tookie lands a job selling books in the store. Tookie must solve the mystery of the haunting, and try to understand what happens in Minneapolis during a year of grief and furious reckoning, in this novel that forces the reader to ask what we owe the living and what we owe the dead.