Valentine Roncalli struggles to save her decades-old family business, finding love and the life she wants along the way.

A once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity takes shoe designer and businesswomen Valentine Roncalli from the winding streets of Greenwich Village to the sun-kissed cobblestones of Buenos Aires, where she finds a long-buried secret hidden deep within a family scandal. Once unearthed, the truth rocks the Roncallis and Valentine is determined to hold her family together as she longs to create one of her own.

Marta's daughter, Hilde, is quarantined with tuberculosis, Marta moves in to care for her granddaughter, Carolyn. The two form a special bond, even as tensions arise between Marta and Hilde. When a family tragedy threatens Carolyn's newfound freedom as a college student in San Francisco, she disappears for two years, returning home later with a daughter of her own, determined to help heal the deep hurt that has plagued her family for years.

Not since The Thorn Birds has Colleen McCullough written a novel of such broad appeal about a family and the Australian experience. When Alexander Kinross -- remembered in his native Scotland only as a shiftless boilermaker's apprentice and godless rebel -- summons his bride Elizabeth Drummond to Australia, his Scottish relatives realize that Kinross has made a fortune in the goldfields and is now a man to be reckoned with. The intimacies of marriage...

This novel continues the stories of five interrelated families who struggle with social, political, and economic turmoil in the mid-twentieth century, during which they witness the rise of Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the horrors of World War II. It picks up right where the first book left off, and continues up to the explosions of the American and Soviet atomic bombs. Carla von Ulrich, born of German and English parents, finds her life...