Dr. Rodney Prince, having delivered Kate Hannigan's illegitimate daughter, becomes enthralled with the much-abused young woman, and over the years their feelings for each other grow into a love they will have to flaunt society to acknowledge.

Copper's peaceful life on Troublesome Creek is endangered by a stepmother determined to turn Copper into a proper lady, a loving father who is haunted by his painful past, and a suitor that promises her a new life far away.

When Nathaniel Hopson, journeyman to the cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale, is sent to Cambridge to install a new library at the home of Lord Montfort, where he finds himself pulled into a mystery after Lord Montfort is found dead.

Twelve-year-old Grace Forcier and her friend Arthur, taken out of school and put to work in a Vermont textile mill in 1910, are championed by their teacher who urges them to write the National Child Labor Committee, an action only Grace seems to realize will have serious repercussions.

Zarité, who is known as Tété, born to an African mother she has never known and a white sailor, survives a brutal childhood and grows up to find comfort in the music and culture of her fellow slaves, and when Toulouse Valmorain purchases young Tété for his bride, both of their lives become intertwined in surprising ways, particularly when they both end up in New Orleans.

Jasmine and Nolan Houston's peaceful life on their horse farm in Lowell, Massachusetts, is uprooted when a tragedy forces the couple to return to the plantation of Jasmine's childhood, where they struggle to keep their family together in the face of violence.

Skeeter returns home to Mississippi from college in 1962 and begins to write stories about the African-American women that are found working in white households, which includes Aibileen, who grieves for the loss of her son while caring for her seventeenth white child, and Minny, Aibileen's sassy friend, the hired cook for a secretive woman who is new to town.

Evelyn Gifford, a lawyer in training in post-World War I London, knows there is more to the story when a young nurse named Meredith and her six-year-old son appear on her doorstep claiming to be the lover and child of Evelyn's late brother, but she is given little time to ponder the mystery when she is assigned the case of a veteran accused of murdering his wife and becomes involved with dashing lawyer Nicholas Thorne, who says he wants to help her....

In 1764, Scottish portrait painter Stewart Jameson, trying to avoid debtors, relocates to Boston, where he takes Fanny Easton, the disgraced daughter of a leading citizen, as his apprentice and together, with the help of runaway slave Dr. Ignatius Alexander, the investigate the murder of an abolitionist.

When Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin takes governance of a penal colony, his wife, Lady Jane, adopts the charming Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, for a social experiment; years later, when Franklin disappears in the Arctic, cases of cannibalism are reported, horrifying English society.