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The Sentence
In this New York Times bestselling 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 errors.
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention," must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.
These book club questions are from the Women's Prize for Fiction. The Sentence was short-listed for the 2022 Prize.
Book club questions for The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.
Through the book, we are thinking about the different kinds of ‘sentence’ Erdrich refers to. First, we think of Tookie’s prison sentence, and then perhaps about the sentence in language, which is something that Tookie often considers. But what other sentences could this novel be about?
When the first mention of Covid-19 comes into the book, we start to think about how the pandemic has created different types of sentences: perhaps the new language and phraseology we started to use, about testing, death rates, survival rates, R rates, underlying conditions and lateral flow tests. Heartbreakingly, Covid has also, for many people, been a death sentence. Has Covid sentenced our society to a particular kind of fate? Why do some receive that sentence and not others? Do you think of Covid as a sentence of some kind, in the sense of a judgement or imposed penalty? How has it affected your life?
Lastly, consider why Native American people are the most over-sentenced people currently imprisoned in the US, as Tookie tells us at the beginning of the book. How do you feel about that? How are books, as collections of sentences, trying to make sense of the pandemic for all of us?
Tookie believes at one point that a sentence in the handwritten memoir killed Flora. Can books kill, in a figurative sense? How? Conversely, how can they save lives?
Tookie tells us about ‘cowbirds’, the name for self-published books that authors sometimes leave in the shop. Have you read any self-published books (or written any?) and what did you think of them/how did you find the experience of writing them?
Consider Laurent and Pollux as fathers. How do they compare and contrast?
Did you relate to the character Dissatisfaction? Are you an insatiable reader like him? Do you have similarly rigid reading requirements, or do you like broader categories of books?
The Sentence Book Club Questions PDF
Click here for a printable PDF of the The Sentence discussion questions