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When her parents are killed in a raid, 11-year-old Helen Morrison and her younger sister Katy are kidnapped by a band of Comanches. Given the name Tehanita, Helen vows to maintain her white identity and clings tightly to her only possession--the dress she was wearing when captured. She is appalled by Katy's quick adjustment to her new home and family. Helen resists assimilation but she must make a decision. Should she become a woman of the People?

Larkin Stanton, orphaned at birth in 1845, is raised by his cousin, Arty Norton. Larkin and Arty's younger brother Hackley grow up surrounded by music and are as close as brothers. Larkin sings before he can talk, and Hackley's fiddle makes all feet want to dance. As they become men, both lose their hearts to pretty, redheaded Mary. But through this complex love and the wrenching destruction of the Civil War, Larkin learns the true meaning of the mournful ballads he has known all his life.

Young Irish American Saul Sullivan marries a beautiful Cherokee woman named Vine. As a mixed race couple, they weather a storm of prejudice, but eventually find acceptance with Saul's family. Then Saul must move away to another country for a year to find work. Taking advantage of his absence, Aaron, Saul's jealous younger brother, begins to make unwanted advances on Vine. The tragic violence to come will change all of their lives forever.

A year ago in 1815, Laura Gardeyne lost her dashing husband, Hal, in a riding accident. Now she must raise her young son at the Gardeyne estate, since he is heir to its fortune. But after Hal's brother fathers a male child, Laura realizes that he might do anything, even murder, to position his offspring as heir.

Randolph Aldridge travels to a snake-infested Cypress mill in Louisiana to find his brother Byron, a troubled veteran of World War I. Once there, Randolph finds that By is a shell of his former self--and that the murderous cartel controlling the mill's casino won't give them any peace.

In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier find that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself.

Edmund, a 17-year-old counterfeiter's apprentice, leaves the criminal job to join Sir Nigel on the Crusade, only to find out it is not as adventurous and heroic as he thought it to be.

When the new highway being constructed avoids Wanderer Springs, the town is left to wither in the dust. Will Callaghan, back for a funeral, remembers the town's sometimes funny, sometimes paintul past, including the time he cost his high school the football championship. Through Will's remembrances the past comes back to life, and Wanderer Springs regains its identity.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was the most reviled and celebrated, loathed and legendary, of Civil War generals. We see Forrest off the battlefield, in the more hidden but no less telling moments of his life: wooing the woman who would become his wife; battling an addiction to gambling; overcoming his abhorrence of the bureaucracy of the army to rise to its highest ranks. We see him taking part in the business of slave trading, but treating his own slaves humanely.

In 1970 the shabby members of a California commune pull up stakes and move to the harsh interior of Alaska. They establish Drop City, a back-to-the-land town, on a foundation of peace and free love. But their idealism cannot prevent tension from rippling through the group.