Annie Meeks

Mercer Mann, a popular writer from Camino Island, is back on the beach, marrying her boyfriend, Thomas, in a seaside ceremony. Bruce Cable, infamous owner of Bay Books, performs the wedding. Afterward, Bruce tells Mercer that he has stumbled upon an incredible story. Mercer desperately needs an idea for her next novel, and Bruce now has one. The true story is about Dark Isle, a sliver of a barrier island not far off the North Florida coast. It was settled by freed slaves three hundred years ago, and their descendants lived there until 1955, when the last one was forced to leave.

Jonathan Asher hides in a hollowed log with his sister while his family’s cabin on the River of the Cherokee burns. There is complete darkness. Outside, a boy’s voice promises, “I’ll come back for you.” This early memory haunts Jonathan Asher as he comes of age in the epic decade leading into the American Revolution. Raised at the Asher Trading Post, his world changes with a blood payment for his life to the Seneca. He takes to the road, first as an itinerant preacher, too young to be not led into temptation, Then as a peddler and vagabond traveling through a country increasingly ...

Against the backdrop of worldwide, unexplainable natural disasters, Dr. Virginia Marilyn Edwards (Emmy Award-winner Kerry Washington) seeks out Agent Scott Thomas (Emmy Award-winner Laurence Fishburne) at a secretive government headquarters. Virginia claims these events are signs, and unless Agent Thomas helps her, she believes things will only get worse. Her desperation is dialed up higher with a shocking proclamation as she stands before him pregnant, weak, and weary: “Agent Thomas,” she says, “I believe I am Mary.”

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

Del Wensley, wife of the most celebrated preacher in Harlan County, tries to mind her place. Until her husband’s infidelity pushes an already strained marriage to a breaking point. Clinging to her last hope for self-respect, Del turns her back on the rigid life she’s known. A coal train is rolling through the valley. With her eyes wide open to the unfamiliar, and to the freedom she craves, Del takes to the rails.

Every family has secrets, and on the hottest day of the year, the truth is about to come out. As a tragedy unfolds behind closed doors, the dawn chorus is split by the wail of sirens. And one by one the families who tried so hard to welcome the Wests begin to realise: Hogarth Street will never be the same again.

Ten-year-old Pearl Spence is a daydreamer, playing make-believe to escape life in Oklahoma's Dust Bowl in 1935. The Spences have their share of misfortune, but as the sheriff's family, they've got more than most in this dry, desolate place. They're who the town turns to when there's a crisis or a need. Pearl is proud of her loving, strong family, though she often wearies of tracking down her mentally impaired older sister or wrestling with her grandmother's unshakable belief in a God. Then a mysterious man bent on revenge tramps into her town of Red River.

Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life—living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising their beautiful son, Asher—was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined that she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, living in the house she grew up in and taking over her father’s beekeeping business. Lily Campanello is familiar with do-overs, too. When she and her mom relocate to Adams, New Hampshire, for her final year of high school, they both hope it will be a fresh start.

Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place that is home to the Boatwright family - a tight-knit clan of rough-hewn, hard- drinking men who shoot up each other's trucks, and indomitable women who get married young and age too quickly. At the heart of this story is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a bastard child who observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective.

One Thousand White Women is the story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who travel to the Western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians.