"Oprhaned aboard a ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and worth with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from the by her white skin. Eventually accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium...

In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a "seigneur," for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters -- barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi'kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures. But Duquet, crafty and ruthless,...

Captured rebel Scotsman Alex MacKinnon is granted the king's mercy-- exile to the Colony of North Carolina. Indentured to Englishman Edmund Carey as a blacksmith, Alex is drawn into the struggles of Carey's slaves-- and those of his stepdaughter, Joanna Carey. She is expected to wed her father's overseer, Phineas Reeves, but finds herself drawn instead to the new blacksmith. As tragedies strike the Careys, blame falls unfairly upon Alex. He flees,...