The book begins a billion years ago. Its first characters are the mastadon and the woolly mammoth, followed by such other settlers as the Eskimos, Athapaskans, and Russians. Vignettes of characters as varied as the Danish navigator Vitus Bering, who explored Alaska for Russia's Peter the Great, and Kendra Scott, the young Colorado teacher who taught the Eskimo children during the recent Prudhoe Bay oil boom, illustrate the colorful history of this...

When an orphan boy witnesses a woman's kidnapping just days before Christmas, he is determined to save her, but the woman doesn't want to be rescued and is taking steps to bring her captors to justice for crimes far worse than kidnapping.

When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family. Orphaned while onboard a ship from Ireland to America, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded...

The captivating story of Cassandra Belle Winston, a young self-centered girl who takes great pride in being called a "socialite". When she falls in love with one of her doctor father's young interns, Cassandra finds that marriage takes her to a community in the uncultured western frontier-where she must adapt or return home alone.

Wanderlust is the story of Audrey Driscoll. Orphaned young, Audrey has grown up caring for her eccentric millionaire grandfather and her demanding younger sister, Annabelle, who assume she will always be there for them. Sheltered yet restless, responsible beyond her years yet hungering for experience, Audrey is hopelessly bound until she herself makes the daring decision to leave. As the 1930s unfold, alone, camera in hand, she will shock friends...

Humphrey Wescott, Earl of Riverdale, has died, leaving behind a fortune and a scandalous secret, a daughter no one knew he had. Anna Snow grew up in an orphanage in Bath, knowing nothing of the family she came from. Now she discovers that the late Earl of Riverdale was her father and that she has inherited his fortune. She is also overjoyed to learn she has siblings. However, they want nothing to do with her or her attempts to share her new wealth....

The romantic adventures of Judith Dunbar, who inherits money from an aunt, allowing her to move freely in English society. The novel chronicles her affairs from boarding school days, through World War II service in the army, to the post-war years.

A prelude to War and Remembrance. "Framed in this multi-paneled tale of voyages, battles, encounters, loves, and disasters- and in the sharply controversial commentary of a German general, giving the view from the other side-The Winds of War encompasses the world conflict from the ominous rumblings of Hitler's Germany in 1939 to the end of 1941 and America's plunge into the war."

It's 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She's immediately in awe of her employer--brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel. Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women's suffrage. Now, at age forty,...

"The novel follows the Cecil family's arduous journey by riverboat and wagon from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. Fifteen-year-old Shay narrates, describing the journey that begins when his Ma, Mary Margaret, decides to hunt down her elusive husband, Dick, to tell him she's leaving him. Without knowing precisely where he is, they set out across the plains in search of him, encountering grizzly bears, stormy weather, and hostile...