The Sentence

By Louise Erdrich,

Book cover of The Sentence

Book description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022
PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE NIGHT WATCHMAN

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In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman's relentless…

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Why read it?

5 authors picked The Sentence as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I love so many things about this book, starting with the title (double-entendre!) and the setting (bookstore!).

I love the snippets of real life (e.g., it’s the author’s bookstore). And then there’s the ghost, Flora. Erdrich does such a good job with Flora. This is not the movie Ghostbusters and it’s not the TV show Ghosts. Flora is just an unseen character, a former customer who keeps hanging out in the bookstore in the time of Covid. Erdrich weaves both Covid and the ghost into the story so smoothly—the book is not about either one of them, but they are…

From Ellen's list on magical books for realists.

The book is sparkling with a great sense of humor, and it starts off as a cute and slightly ghoulish ghost story set in a local bookstore which is haunted by a deceased customer, an annoying white woman who was a rude imposter of Native American heritage.

Published in 2021, the story is quickly outrun by the historical context: The supernatural apparitions are now parallel to a weird airborne virus that shuts down public life; George Floyd is murdered, and protests of the Black Life Matters movement engulf Minneapolis.

The book becomes witness to the emotional effects of 2020 events…

Louise Erdrich’s most recent novel continues the trend of her recent work of venturing into different kinds of novels. In recent years, she has published dystopian fiction and fiction hueing closely to her family’s personal history.

The Sentence is set in Erdrich’s Minneapolis-based bookstore, Birchbark Books, during the pandemic and George Floyd protests, and, though clearly fiction, it has the feel of a first-person dispatch from our recent tumultuous times.

It is also a ghost story, and it brings together Erdrich’s trademark insightful characterization with a willingness to consider the world as a mysterious place that is sometimes dangerous, sometimes…

A Diary in the Age of Water

By Nina Munteanu,

Book cover of A Diary in the Age of Water

Nina Munteanu Author Of Darwin's Paradox

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Why am I passionate about this?

Author Writer Ecologist Mother Teacher Explorer

Nina's 3 favorite reads in 2023

What is my book about?

This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity.

Single mother and limnologist Lynna witnesses disturbing events as she works for the powerful international utility CanadaCorp. Fearing for the welfare of her rebellious teenage daughter, Lynna sets in motion a series of events that tumble out of her control with calamitous consequence. The novel explores identity, relationship, and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.

A Diary in the Age of Water

By Nina Munteanu,

What is this book about?

Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred—events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust—and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins—Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a…


Could there be more star-crossed lovers? Pollux must arrest Tookie after she's tricked into driving a man's body over state lines, inadvertently transporting drugs as well. 

After she serves her time, they connect through kindness and care, and marry. She works in a bookstore, haunted by annoying customer Flora. Tookie's convinced that Flora was killed by a powerful sentence in the last book she'd read. The word "sentence" becomes a clever device, connoting Tookie's incarceration, as well as being implicated in Flora's demise.
There are many layers to The Sentence, with themes of indigenous people, marital love, mothers who are…

From Carol's list on star-crossed soul mates.

Louise Erdrich, herself, epitomizes what I love most about reading her stories.

She inspires resilience and change in facing adversity, and does so with humor, laser beam intelligence, and a depth of understanding humanity that is breathtaking, all the while bringing together disparate ideas with the ease of a magician.

As an avid reader of her writings about Native American life, I usually consider her most recent fiction to be my favorite, which is how I feel about The Sentence. Erdrich highlights the non-fictional horrors of 2019-2020 with the COVID pandemic, George Floyd murder, and violent protests.

Her fabulously imagined…

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