LuLing Young is now in her eighties, and finally beginning to feel the effects of old age. Trying to hold on to the evaporating past, she begins to write down all that she can remember of her life as a girl in China. Meanwhile, her daughter Ruth, a ghostwriter for authors of self-help books, is losing the ability to speak up for herself in front of the man she lives with. LuLing can only look on, helpless: her prickly relationship with her daughter...

The Berrybenders' party is moving forward across the Great Plains of the West towards Santa Fe. Tasmin's husband scouts ahead and falls in love with Pomp Charbonneau, who dies at the hand of the ruthless commander of the Spanish troops. A vast cast of characters meet up with the party as they travel, proving that the rolling grassy plains are not as empty as they look.

John Bergson, a Swedish farmer, struggles desperately with the soil but dies unsatisfied. His daughter Alexandra resolves to vindicate his faith, and her strong character carries her weak older brothers and her mother along to a new zest for life. Years of privation are rewarded on the farm. But when Alexandra falls in love with Carl Linstrum, and her family objects because he is poor, he leaves to seek a different career. After Alexandra's younger...

In the raw immigrant quarters and with the help of an entrepreneurial Irish serving girl, ribbon-decked Polish ragman and austere Alsatian dressmaker, Irma begins to stitch together a new life . . . until her peace and self are shattered in the charred remains of the Great Chicago Fire. Enduring a painful recovery, Irma reaches deep within to find that she has even more to offer the world than her remarkable ability with a needle and thread.

Antonia Shimerda, the destitute child of Bohemian immigrants, and Jim Burden, a native Virginian who, after being orphaned at the age of ten, is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska. Jim goes to Harvard, becomes a traveling busnissman,a nd returns to Nebraska infrequently; Antonia elopes with a shiftless railroad conductor, comes home disgraced, and finds happiness with Anton Cuzak, a gentle farmer.

A single-volume anthology of the epic story of the Berrybender pioneer family follows the relocation of British aristocrats Lord and Lady Berrybender to 1830 Texas, where their idealistic plans are shaped by their daughter's relationship with frontiersman Jim Snow.

Ned, a philandering painter, uses Sonja as his model. But she becomes more than his model and more than an object of desire-she becomes the most inspiring muse Ned has ever known. When both Ned and her husband insist on possessing her, their jealousies threaten to erupt into violence, and Sonja must find a way to placate both men without sacrificing her hard-won sense of self.

When genealogist Torie O'Shea gets an invitation from her favorite aunt, Sissy, to come and spend some time with her in Minnesota, she jumps at the chance. She piles her husband and father-in-law into the car, leaving her two daughters in the care of her mother back home in Missouri, and hits the road, looking forward to some relaxation and some family bonding. Once they arrive, Torie finds out that her aunt's invitation was not so innocent: Sissy...

Honolulu is the richly imagined story of Jin, a young "picture bride" who leaves her native Korea -- where girls are so little valued that she is known as Regret -- and journeys to Hawaii in 1914 in search of a better life. Instead of the prosperous young husband and the chance at an education she has been promised, Jin is quickly married off to a poor, embittered laborer who takes his disappointments out on his new wife, forcing her to make her own...

"From the bestselling author of King Leopold's Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts comes the astonishing but forgotten story of an immigrant sweatshop worker who married an heir to a great American fortune and became one of the most charismatic radical leaders of her time"--