THE STORY IN BRIEF

Tale of Twins is an epic American novel in three volumes—and counting—rooted in Lakota tradition, Indigenous sovereignty, and one of the most extraordinary premises in contemporary fiction: the discovery, by a Native family who belongs to the land above it, of the largest natural resource find in the recorded history of human civilization. Written under the pseudonym Joe Kidd, the series moves from the intimate emotional territory of siblings making life-defining choices to the vast geological and spiritual territory of an underground world that has been waiting, in its specific patient way, for the right people to find it.

It is a story about what it means to belong to land rather than own it. About what happens when the people who have always been displaced from the center of their own story finally stand at the center of it. About the relationship between what the earth holds and what the people above it are capable of receiving. And about the oldest question of all—one that the second book raises at its close and that will take the full length of the series to answer.

THE WORLD

The series is set primarily in rural Kansas, on and beneath a million acres of land that was taken in a 1874 railroad land grant by a German immigrant named Heinrich Braun, who believed he was taking farmland. He was not taking the farmland. He was taking the rim of an impact crater eight hundred miles in diameter, created when an iron-nickel-lead asteroid sixty-nine miles wide arrived from space at hypervelocity and restructured the geology of a continent. He had no idea. Neither did anyone else, for another hundred and fifty years.

The land passed through three generations of the Braun family, each generation a little more aware of the obligation it carried, until it reached William White Bear—a man of German-Lakota ancestry who spent sixty years trying to answer the question his mother asked him at a kitchen table when he was twelve years old: this is what you have. What are you going to do about it?

William's answer, building slowly across six decades, was to prepare a structure capable of holding whatever the land eventually gave—legal, financial, institutional, relational—and to wait for the people who belonged to the land to be in a position to receive what it offered.

The people he was waiting for were the Lakota family at the center of the series. And the land they belonged to was holding something that no one, including William, had fully imagined.

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