Ensconced within a Hudson Valley retreat where expectant birth mothers are given luxurious accommodations and lucrative rewards to produce perfect babies, a Filipino immigrant is forced to choose between a life-changing payment and the outside world.

Kristin Eikaas has her hopes set on a new life in America. The year is 1848, and Kristin Eikaas has traveled from Norway to Wisconsin with dreams of a new life. But when she arrives, she finds one disappointment after another. Worse, her superstitious uncle now believes that his neighbor's Oneida Indian wife has put a curse on Kristin. Everyone knows the Sundbergs put spells on people... Everyone except Kristin. Her run-ins with Sam Sundberg only...

It is 1830, and the Berrybender family -- rich, aristocratic, English, and fiercely out of place -- is on its way up the Missouri River to see the American West as it begins to open up. Lord and Lady Berrybender have abandoned their palatial home in England to explore the frontier and to broaden the horizons of their children, who include Tasmin, a budding young woman of grit, beauty, and determination, her vivacious and difficult sister, and her...

In The Wandering Hill, Larry McMurtry continues the story of Tasmin Berrybender and her family in the unexplored Wild West of the 1830s, at that point in time when Lewis and Clark are still a living memory, and when the clash between the powerful Indian tribes of the Missouri and the encroaching white Americans is about to turn into full-blown tragedy. Amidst all this, the Berrybender family -- English, eccentric, wealthy, and fiercely out of place...

In the final volume of The Berrybender Narratives, Tasmin and her family are under arrest in Mexican Santa Fe. Tasmin, who would once have followed her husband anywhere, is no longer even sure she likes him, or knows where to go to next. Captain Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame, is puzzled by the great changes sweeping over the West, replacing red men and buffalo with towns and farms. Jim Snow, Kit Carson and one of Lord Berrybender's many illegitimate...

An Italian woman emigrates to America with her husband during the early part of the twentieth century and must navigate a new language and country while dealing with the economic and social upheaval of an impending war.

Nazneen is forced into an arranged marriage with a much older man whose expectations of life are miserably low. When they flee the oppression of their Bangladeshi village for a high-rise block in the East End, she finds herself cloistered and dependent on her husband. It soon becomes apparent that of the two, she is the real survivor and more able to deal with the ways of the world and the vagaries of human behavior. Through her friendship with another...

At the heart of this third volume of his Western saga remains the beautiful and determined Tasmin Berrybender, now married to the "Sin Killer" and mother to their young son, Monty. Although Tasmin intends Monty to become an English gentleman like his grandfather, he lives the childhood of a savage. By Sorrow's River continues the Berrybender party's trail across the endless Great Plains of the West toward Santa Fe, where those lucky enough to survive...

An immigrant youth struggling to assimilate, a middle-aged housewife with a troubled marriage, a Vegas social worker, and a wounded soldier connect with each other and rescue themselves in the wake of an unthinkable incident.