While her father is away fighting the Normans and other Irish clans, nine-year-old Lara works hard to help harvest food and also cares for the pregnant gray mare that she loves.

A fictionalized account of the Donner Party tragedy told through the journal entries and letters of Tamsen Donner, the wife of George Donner, the leader of the party that, in 1846, set out for California and wound up trapped for four months in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Cassie O'Malley, a determined young woman, fights the odds and becomes a world-renowned aviator.

A story within a story in which a historian discovers a manuscript in an old trunk which proves to be the memoirs of Charles O'Brien, an itinerant healer in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which he tells of his influence on some of the great writers of the time, and explains how his life changed at the age of forty when he fell in love with, and was rejected by, a beautiful, young Englishwoman.

A marine biologist tries to uncover the secrets of some mysterious Chinese artifacts that were discovered after a natural disaster struck Northern California in the early 1900s, but the artifacts disappear again, only to be rediscovered by a new generation of explorers who are eager to explore the ocean to find answers.

The Kellaway family, newly arrived in London in 1792 where father Thomas has been offered work by circus entrepreneur Philip Astley, discovers they are neighbors to famous printer, poet, and political radical William Blake, who is inspired by the coming-of-age adventures of young Jem Kellaway and his sister Maisie to writer one of his most famous works.

Dorothea Granger is commissioned by her Uncle Jacob to stitch an unusual quilt; but when the man dies, Dorothea determines to continue his work helping runaway slaves along the Underground Railroad.

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.

Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 hoping to start a new life with her husband, but the pair soon find themselves struggling to fit into an unknown culture.

John Stone, a successful financier and arms dealer, thrives during the years before World War I, but his fortune and luck end when he mysteriously falls to his death from the window of his London home.