Creation Lake is told from the perspective of a spy for hire (and former federal agent) known for the purposes of her current assignment as "Sadie Smith". She is in the process of infiltrating an agrarian commune of eco-leftists in France, known as the Moulinards. In order to do so, she has entered into a serious ‘relationship’ with a filmmaker called Lucien, who is close to the Moulinards' day-to-day leader, Pascal.

This Strange Eventful History covers the lives of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family, the Cassars, from 1940 to 2010. It begins with a couple of maps that highlight key locations in the novel, alerting us early on to a recurrent theme of the novel, that of dislocation and a lack of a discernable 'home', for a community (of which Messud herself is a direct descendant) represented by the novel's central family.