With pictures of William Faulkner, Octavia Butler and Jean Rhys tucked in its pages, she would carry the heavy, cloth-bound dictionary to school and college, through her marriage and even when she was raising her adopted daughters.

She runs an indie book store in Minneapolis, Birchbark Books & Native Arts, and has a cameo in the novel as herself.Įrdrich turned to writing after she won a dictionary in an essay-writing competition in 1971. Erdrich belongs to the same tribe, often referred to as Chippewa. The protagonist, who is also the narrator, is a Native American woman named Tookie, who belongs to the Ojibwe tribe and runs a book store. It is bookended by All Souls Day, an occasion to honour the dead among Roman Catholics, a structure Erdrich employs skilfully to explore connections between the living and the dead. In addition to the title that seems to be a play on both the meanings of the word-linguistic expression and incarceration-the epigraph from Korean-American poet Sun Yung Shin’s experimental collection, Unbearable Splendour, emphasises the centrality of the world of letters to the plot: “From the time of birth to the time of death, every word you utter is part of one long sentence.” The novel, set in Minneapolis in the US, spans a tumultuous year in which the pandemic upends lives, sweeping away old certainties and exposing the hollowness of the healthcare system. It also includes a seven-page reading recommendation at the end-unusual in a novel. In its universe, books are “matters of life and death, and readers reach through unknowable realms to maintain some connection to the written word”.

Woven into the narrative are reading lists from its bookseller protagonist. In a larger sense, it also reinforces the significance of books in our lives. Erdrich’s 18th novel, The Sentence, too centres on a family living through challenging times, amid the looming spectre of a ghost, and a virus. Past and present, love and obsession, white and indigenous often appear to be on a collision course.

Erdich, whose Native American lineage is generative to her fiction and poetry, weaves her novels around love, violence, revenge and redemption. The unending struggle of families to survive in a changing world is the connective tissue that runs across Louise Erdrich’s novels.

The sentence a novel