Maria lives in Cuba during the mid-twentieth century and allows Ignacio, a strong-willed business man, to provide for her while she shares a passionate love affair with Nestor, a poor musician; meanwhile, Maria's daughter Teresa grows up in the United States.

Freydeh, a young Jewish woman from Russia, struggles to make a living in post-Civil War New York City, where she hopes to find the American dream and a better life for herself.

Three Chinese youngsters, Steel Hope, his bookmate Mountain Pine, and Firecracker, a gravekeeper's daughter, vow to remain true to each other and their country, a promise that becomes impossible to keep as war, upheaval, and personal tragedies intrude.

6,000 years in the past, twelve-year-old Tarak and his guide, a wolf cub, set out on a dangerous journey to fulfill an oath the boy made to his dying father -- to travel to the Mountain of the World Spirit seeking a way to destroy a demon-possessed bear that threatens all the clans.

Plodding police inspector Carus Groves teams up with retired professor Thomas McKnight and his gravedigger assistant to investigate when a series of grisly murders strikes Edinburgh in the 1880s, shortly after the return of Evelyn Todd, a young woman who had been expelled from the Fountainbridge Institute for Destitute Girls years earlier for weaving fantastic stories about a cheerful lamplighter.

Claire Shipley, a photojournalist, tries to keep herself detatched from her most recent assignment, reporting on the new "miracle drug" penicillin, but ends up putting herself in the middle of everything when a murder occurs and she searches for the killer.

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.

In the early twentieth century, young orphan Maud Flynn hopes to finally be loved when she is adopted by the elderly Hawthorne sisters, but she is instead roped into the family's crooked séance business.

Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer, orphaned when his parents both commit suicide on the same day, goes to live with his aunt and uncle in Nova Scotia in 1941 and falls in love with Tilda, his cousin by adoption, but things go tragically wrong when Tilda brings home German student Hans Mohring, a young man viewed with suspicion by everyone in town.

Thorston, an alchemist who has spent his life trying to decipher the secret to immortality contained in the Book Without Words, is on the brink of realizing his dream when he drops dead, leaving Odo, a talking raven, and Sybil, a servant who was about to be sacrificed to Thorston's plan, to reap the rewards of his work.