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When Flora’s foster daughter gives Tookie the book her mother died while reading, “The Sentence: An Indian Captivity, 1862-1883,” Tookie senses its ominous power. Tookie can’t tell Pollux, who won’t stand for any talk of ghosts, and feels increasingly isolated.

In life, Flora was an Indian “wannabe,” a white woman who volunteered in the Native American community, at times claimed Indian ancestry, and was consumed by her “earnest, unaccountable, persistent, self-obliterating delusion.” Once dead, she becomes “a slinky, needy, invasive spirit,” making “rustling noises” and moving books around. The bookstore’s most irritating customer, book-besotted but needy Flora, dies on All Soul’s Day, 2019, and proceeds to haunt the bookstore. Led by a meta-fictional Erdrich, who has a ghost in her house, publishes a novel about her grandfather (2020′s Pulitzer Prize winning “The Night Watchman”), and has her book tour interrupted by the pandemic, the bookstore employees are a motley crew of intellectuals, artists, and eccentrics who share a passion for books and for their ardently book-loving customers. She finds a job at Birchbark Books (the small independent store Louise Erdrich founded). Emerging, blinking and disoriented, into a changed world, Tookie reconnects with Pollux, the police officer who’d arrested her they fall in love and marry. She’d thought she was helping a friend and knew nothing about the drugs, but nonetheless “received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in an after-life.”Īfter seven years in prison, Tookie’s sentence is unexpectedly commuted to time served.

In her aimless, hard-drinking and drug-addled, intermittently employed thirties, Tookie was arrested for “stealing a corpse” stuffed with drugs and transporting it across state lines. Its narrator, a Native American woman named Tookie, is perhaps Erdrich’s most indelible creation: hilarious, smart, wry, with, as she puts it, both “a dinosaur heart, cold, massive, indestructible, a thick meaty red” and “a glass heart, tiny and pink, that can be shattered.”

Unlike her last novel, “ The Night Watchman,” which ranged across a wide variety of perspectives, “The Sentence” is told almost exclusively from the point of view of one person.