Time traveller Claire Randall warns her husband, Scotsman Jamie Fraser, that the coming War of Independence between Britain and America may threaten everything the couple holds dear. Jamie, a loyalist, is forced to make difficult choices.

Jason Dark flees his failed career and the estrangement of his wife and son, and resolves to bring his family's vineyard, now idle, back into production. He achieves this, and his wife and son return. Then he is involved in a hit-and-run accident, and the guilt he feels threatens to destroy his life yet again.

In this story of injustice and redemption set in rural Louisiana during the late 1940s, Grant Wiggins, a backwoods schoolmaster, is asked visit a young black prisoner on death row. Jefferson, the prisoner, was falsely accused and convicted of murder and is sentenced to hang, and Wiggins's job, once he realizes the impossibility of overturning the verdict, is to prepare the boy for death. Although, as a nonbeliever, Wiggins at first finds himself in competition with the minister for the boy's attention, he eventually comes to see that the cultivation of any instinct of love--human or religious--is the essence of salvation, both for Jefferson and himself. Ernest J. Gaines's morally wrenching novel has become a classic of American literature.

A story of racism, violence, and self-realization set in backwoods Louisiana under the Jim Crow era. The action is set in motion when a white farmer is murdered by a black, in circumstances reminiscent of the notorious Emmet Till case of the 1950s. Rather than allow the defendant to be summarily executed--or lynched--fifteen elderly black men go to the local sheriff and each confess to the crime, thereby making prosecution of the case virtually impossible.

In this story of injustice and redemption set in rural Louisiana during the late 1940s, Grant Wiggins, a backwoods schoolmaster, is asked visit a young black prisoner on death row. Jefferson, the prisoner, was falsely accused and convicted of murder and is sentenced to hang, and Wiggins's job, once he realizes the impossibility of overturning the verdict, is to prepare the boy for death. Although, as a nonbeliever, Wiggins at first finds himself in competition with the minister for the boy's attention, he eventually comes to see that the cultivation of any instinct of love--human or religious--is the essence of salvation, both for Jefferson and himself. Ernest J. Gaines's morally wrenching novel has become a classic of American literature.