(“This light word”-sentence-“lay so heavily upon me,” she says.) A lawyer managed to cut her time to a decade Tookie now works at a bookstore owned by an eccentric older writer named Louise. During her thirties, Tookie was involved in a body-snatching caper-she stole a man’s remains, unwittingly transporting the crack cocaine taped under his armpits across state lines-and received a sixty-year prison sentence. The protagonist is Tookie, an Ojibwe woman in middle age. It’s more like a room stuffed with ideas, history, big chunks of shorter novels, peripheral characters, and plots rolled up like carpets to lean companionably against the walls. “The Sentence,” though, is not-or not only-a fantastical portrait of inner life. My branches caught and lowered me until I was floating just over the floor.” A climactic scene in “The Sentence,” for instance, scoops up an earlier image only to repurpose it: “I closed my eyes,” the narrator says, “and in the blackness my tree crashed down, flailing forward. They often shimmer with spirits, and yet their true uncanniness derives from Erdrich’s more classical facility with evocation and character. (Her previous novel “ The Night Watchman” was inspired by her grandfather, an activist and local hero it won the Pulitzer Prize, in 2021.) The books are marked by warmth and patience, and by their protagonists’ sly, rough-edged amiability. Erdrich often writes about the “Indigerati”-her name for urban, intellectual Native Americans-of the Upper Midwest.

Powerful, inviting, friendly-these adjectives might describe Erdrich’s own strengths, ramifying across more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, children’s literature, and essays. When, partway through “ The Sentence,” a new novel by Louise Erdrich, a hundred-and-two-year-old tree falls down, the leafy crown looks “powerful,” “inviting.” Characters gather to touch the lichen-spotted bark.

The sentence erdrich