"Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934 and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma is struggling as the earliest storms of The Dust Bowl descend. All around them the wheat harvests are drying out and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Great Plains. As the Bells wait for the rains to come,...

In 1957, problems at the mine threaten to ruin Christmas for fifth-grader Don, his family, and the rest of their Oklahoma coal town, but Don's bloodhound, Frank, is determined to do whatever it takes to make the holiday special for Don and his six-year-old sister, Susan. Alternate chapters are told from the human and canine points of view.

Assigned to security work at a German POW camp in Oklahoma, a disillusioned Hook Runyon and his moonshiner sidekick, Runt, stumble on the dead body of a coal picker and uncover a dangerous conspiracy involving Nazi prisoners and stolen art.

"Twelve-year-old Vonceil cannot wait for her older brother Elber to come home to the family farm in Oklahoma after serving on the front lines of World War I. But the young man who greets her at the train station is serious and responsible, not the fun-loving brother she remembers, and he doesn't have time for her anymore -- especially not after he marries his plain, boring childhood sweetheart. Soon after the wedding, glamorous, mysterious Greda arrives...

"The U.S. has finally entered the First World War and scheduled the first draft lottery. No one in Boynton, Oklahoma, is unaffected by the clash between rabid pro-war, anti-immigrant "patriots" and anti-conscription socialists, who are threatening an uprising rather than submit to the draft. Alafair Tucker is caught in the middle when her brother, a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, pays her a visit. Rob Gunn is fresh out of...