In 1944, twenty-three-year-old Tess DeMello abruptly ends her engagement to the love of her life when she marries a mysterious stranger and moves to Hickory, North Carolina, a small town struggling with racial tension and the hardships imposed by World War II. Tess’s new husband, Henry Kraft, is a secretive man who often stays out all night, hides money from his new wife, and shows no interest in making love. Tess quickly realizes she’s trapped in a strange and loveless marriage with no way out.

Sara Hawthorne is a dedicated attorney, a loyal wife, and the mother of two 19-year-old girls. When her husband succumbs to cancer, Sara has to battle the grief and also the addiction to which one of her daughters falls prey. Maximus Tempest, eager to get his estranged wife to sign the divorce papers, is frustrated when she is taken to the hospital after overdosing. When Sara and Max see each other after 20 years, old feelings spring to life.

The world is at war. A young man bravely kisses his weeping bride goodbye at the train station, leaving her all alone. Then the dreaded telegram, and a decision that nearly tears her apart.

Eleanor Murray will always remember her childhood on Edisto Island, where her late father, a local shrimper, shared her passion for music. Now her memories of him are all that tempers the guilt she feels over the accident that put her sister in a wheelchair and the feelings she harbors for her sister's husband. To help support her sister, Eleanor works at a Charleston investment firm during the day, but she escapes into her music, playing piano at a neighborhood bar. Until the night her enigmatic boss walks in and offers her a part-time job caring for his elderly aunt, Helena, back on Edisto.

Dr. Olivia Simon is on duty in the emergency room of North Carolina's Outer Banks Hospital when a gunshot victim is brought in. Midway through the desperate effort to save the young woman's life, Olivia realizes who she is - Annie O'Neill, the woman Olivia's husband, Paul, is in love with.

They are the Season sisters, bound by blood, driven apart by a tragedy. Now they are about to embark on a bittersweet journey into the unknown — an odyssey of promise and forgiveness, of loss and rediscovery.

Three women, united by love and kinship, struggle to conform to the social norms of the times in which they live. In 1931 Katherine Henderson leaves behind her small town in Kansas and the marriage proposal of a local boy to live on her own and work at the Sears & Roebuck glove counter in Chicago. There she meets Annie - a bold, outspoken feminist who challenges Katherine's idea of who she thinks she is and what she thinks she wants in life.

Following her estranged mother's death, Marissa Cole returns to her hometown. Her mother has left a request for Marissa to scatter her ashes in New Hope, Maine. Marissa doesn't understand why; she's never heard her mother talk of such a place. In Maine, Marissa is thrilled to discover a family she never knew she had. But the family isn't what she thought, and helping her grandmother keep her share of the family fortune might cause Marissa to lose the only man she's ever trusted enough to love.

Born to a white mother and an African-American father, Dallas Oliver has always felt like an outsider. Life gets more complicated when her mother dies and she moves in with her father and stepmother. The one saving grace is Dallas' unexpected friendship with a white girl named Valerie Holland. Decades later, they're still best friends. Dallas is a journalist for a controversial magazine and Valerie is a single mother.

After her marriage ends in bitter divorce, all Lorren Jacobs wants is to leave California behind. Returning to her roots in Texas seems to be just what the doctor ordered...until she meets real-life physician Justin Madaris. Lorren has vowed never to give her heart to another man, but she can't stop herself from responding to the handsome widower's sensuous whispers of love. Justin thought no woman could ever move him as deeply as his wife had. Until Lorren.

Joy, a work of both romance and tragedy, is bound together by the unshakable faith of its protagonist. Anya Mitchell seems to have it all - a profitable financial services business, a handsome fiance, and an expensive diamond ring. But there are unwelcome doubts lingering in her mind. Danger also looms on the horizon, as a stalker lurking at the edge of her life draws closer.

Shelby Roswell is a history professor on the fast track to tenure until her new book is crushed in a review by the famous historian, Ransom Fielding. She struggles to regain her momentum only to discover that Fielding has taken a visiting professorship at her college. The place that was once a refuge from the poverty of her past is now a battlefield of Civil War proportions. Together, Shelby and Ransom learn that home is never very far away, and when you least expect it, love arrives.

In the wake of a painful breakup and struggling to prove herself at work, Julia feels adrift. When Bryce blows into her life, he seems like the perfect anchor. Handsome, charming, secure, and confident, Bryce brings out the best in Julia, sweeping her off her feet with attention and affection while grounding her with his certainty and faith. But this is no fairy tale. Step by step, one small concession leading to another, Julia is slowly isolated from her job, her friends, and her family, until she comes to find that her dream come true is a cage. Then one day everything changes....

Lilian Morrison has one memento of her beloved sister, Emma: a battered silver music box. A family heirloom that was passed down through two world wars, the box was the key to Lilian’s recent, joyous reunion with the surviving members of her birth family, whom she lost many years earlier when she and her sister fled Hitler’s Germany on the Kindertransport. Now Lilian is compelled to investigate Emma’s final days after the girls were shipped to separate foster families in Britain and the time before Emma was killed in the London Blitz.

As a counselor, Sophia Barrett is trained to help people cope with their burdens. But when she meets a new patient whose troubles mirror her own, she realizes she hasn’t dealt with the pain of her recent past. After making a snap decision to get away for the summer, Sophia moves overseas to an apartment above a charming bookstore in Cornwall, England. She is hopeful she will find peace there surrounded by her favorite thing: great literature.