The Sentence

Published:20 Jan 2022

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022

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.