In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his. Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He is determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker. Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, she tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future --- her daughter’s and her own. Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009.

Louise Erdrich's 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.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel-bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953, and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”?

The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Thirty-two-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker is four months pregnant. Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby’s origins. As she goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe.

Hunting along the edge of his property, Landreaux Iron accidentally kills his neighbor's five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich. Horrified at what he’s done, the recovered alcoholic turns to an Ojibwe tribe tradition --- the sweat lodge --- for guidance and finds a way forward. Following an ancient means of retribution, he and his wife, Emmaline, will give their son, LaRose, to Dusty's grieving parents. But when a vengeful man with a long-standing grudge against Landreaux begins raising trouble, hurling accusations of a cover-up the day Dusty died, he threatens the tenuous peace that has kept these two fragile families whole.

The victim of a recent attack, Geraldine Coutts is reluctant to relive or reveal to anyone what happened. She will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Her son, Joe, becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.