In 1915, Seventeen-year-old Bess Heath, the youngest daughter of the Niagara Power Company director, finishes board school and returns to her family home at the falls to find that much has changed for the worse, and when she meets the rough and fearless Tom Cole by chance, she is forced to make a difficult decision.

Fionna Finnegan has always dreamed of opening a shop with her longtime love, Joe Bristow, but when a dark and brutal man takes away everything she holds dear, her dreams are shattered and she is forced to flee London for New York, where she hopes to begin a new life.

In 1718, off the coast of North Carolina, a young cabin boy assists in the final capture and execution of Blackbeard the pirate.

Hallie and her parents join a wagon train to Oregon leaving her grandmother behind, and now Hallie must learn to face the storms that frighten her as well as other, newer fears, with just her grandmother's quilt to comfort her.

Scout Finch, the young daughter of a local attorney in the Deep South during the 1930s, tells of her father's defense of an African-American man charged with the rape of a white girl.

In rural Indiana in 1904, fifteen-year-old Russell's dreams of quitting school and joining a wheat threshing crew are disrupted when his older sister takes over the teaching at his one-room schoolhouse after mean old Myrt Arbuckle "hauls off and dies."

Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea who was raised by William Clark, travels to Europe to be educated at the court of Duke Paul, Prince of Wurttemberg, where he longs for his life in the New World and sets off on a journey of self discovery that will take him into the heart of the American wilderness and offer the promise of redemption.

Hoping to have an adventure to impress her grandcows, Emmadine Cow joins Admiral Richard E. Byrd on his 1933 expedition to the South Pole.

In 1934, Ella Barron struggles to keep her Texas boardinghouse afloat despite the financial hardships her neighbors are facing, which leads her to rent a room to the soft-spoken David Rainwater, who shows Ella and her ten-year-old son the true meaning of trust and compassion.

The lives of Abbess Helewise of Hawkenlye and Sir Josse d'Acquin are changed forever when they are summoned by Eleanor of Aquitaine to an island off the coast of France where Helewise is assigned to oversee the construction of a cathedral being built to honor Eleanor's son, King Richard the Lionheart, and Sir Josse is charged with investigating a link between Richard and a group of knights rumored to be devil worshippers.