Tessa O’Connor is tired of the high society lifestyle, and the pressure is on for her to marry a wealthy man. Fearful of becoming trapped in a life that would make her increasingly miserable, she decides to try the mail-order bride approach.

Orphaned during her passage from Ireland, young, white Lavinia arrives on the steps of the kitchen house and is placed, as an indentured servant, under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate slave daughter. Lavinia learns to cook, clean, and serve food while guided by the quiet strength and love of her new family. In time Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, caring for the master's opium-addicted wife and befriending his dangerous yet protective son. She attempts to straddle the worlds of the kitchen and big house, but her skin color will forever set her apart.

Michael Phillips is one of today's most popular Christian authors. He has written more than four dozen novels, with over five million copies in print. Angels Watching Over Me is the first book in a stirring saga that follows two women, one black, one white, in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Caroline is desperate to reach Oregon and find her only living relative. She persuades Simon, a man traveling on a wagon train, to let her pose as his wife. As they face and overcome capture by Indians and other dangerous adventures along the Oregon Trail, Caroline and Simon bond as friends. When they reach Oregon and Caroline's Aunt Hattie, they go their separate ways as agreed upon at the beginning of their farce. Soon, they both realize that parting was a mistake. Did love come too quietly for them to recognize it—and have they lost their chance? Will they find each other again?

Blackboard best-selling author Bertice Berry breaks all the rules of romantic comedy with this funny, sexy novel about an older couple rediscovering their passion for living and loving. Jim and Louella's love life has gone a bit chilly after 26 years of marriage. But then Louella's ancestors visit her dreams, and a sexual reawakening quickly follows. Soon after, Jim and Louella realize they can read the thoughts of other people, so they begin a quest to heal the community around them.

Declan O'Bryan left Ireland to seek his fortune in the New World, but the journey was long for a man without a penny to his name. It took years of back-breaking work as a sailor and a journeyman for him to finally reach Montana, and to have enough money to his name to earn the title of proud homesteader. There's only one thing missing from his life now, and, unlike the boys in town, he's not convinced a man should find a wife in a catalog, the same way he buys a plow.

The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around fast. If the preacher's wife's petticoat shows, the ladies will make the talk last a week. But on July 5, 1906, things take a scandalous turn. That is the day E. Rucker Blakeslee, proprietor of the general store and barely three weeks a widower, elopes with Miss Love Simpson, a woman half his age and, worse yet, a Yankee!

Fragrant blossoms herald spring, but the orchard is also a place of secrets and heartache. After the death of her husband Frank, Eliza is left with three young children and mounting debts. When a gentle stranger enters her orchard, she experiences a peculiar sensation of familiarity with the man. But will his unknown past jeopardize all that she has fought for?

With the depression bearing down on her family, there isn't much that Cassie Logan can count on anymore. But there is one thing that hasn't changed - the whispering trees outside her window. Cassie's trees, which have stood for centuries, are a great source of comfort to her. But they are also worth a lot of money. With Cassie's daddy gone to lay tracks for the railroad, it seems like no one can stop Mr. Andersen from forcing Big Ma to sell their valuable trees. How can Cassie sit by and watch them disappear?

Charlotte Parkhurst was raised in the mid-1800s and was expected to live her life without the freedoms she dreamed of. But Charlotte was smart and determined, and she figured out a way to live her life the way she wanted; Charlotte became an expert horse rider, a legendary stagecoach driver, and the first woman ever to vote—at a time when such things were outlawed for women.

Best-selling author of Too Long a Stranger and Julia's Last Hope, Janette Oke is loved for her inspirational novels. In Once Upon a Summer, Oke weaves the tender tale of 12-year-old, Joshua, who has been raised by his 18-year-old aunt and their grandparents. He has grown accustomed to their close-knit family, but that is all about to change when Joshua's aunt considers marriage. Johnny Heller touchingly narrates the trials of faith this family must face.

Fans of inspirational fiction eagerly devour historical novels from Christy Award winner Lynn Austin. In All Things New, the acclaimed author weaves a tale set in the aftermath of the Civil War. Josephine Weatherly and her mother, Eugenia, return to their Virginia plantation, but their once-grand home has lost its lustre. Jo’s father and brother are dead, and the war has left her remaining brother broken and embittered. Bonding with Lizzie, one of the few remaining servants, Jo struggles to rebuild her life....

In the waning years of the 19th century, Bessie Daniels grows up in the small town of Hot Springs in western North Carolina. Secure in the love of her father, resistant to her mother's desire that she be a proper Southern belle, Bessie is determined to forge her own way in life. Or, as her Cherokee great-grandmother Elisi puts it, to be a whistling woman. Life, however, has a few surprises in store for Bessie....

When it was first published in 1979, this novel introduced inspirational fiction to people hungry for well-told stories based on Christian values. Since then, over a million copies have been sold, and it has been made into a popular Hallmark movie. Janette Oke has won the Christy Award, the Gold Medallion, and scores of other awards.

Every first Sunday in June, members of the Moses clan gather for an annual reunion at “the old home place,” a sprawling hundred-acre farm in Arkansas. And every year, Samuel Lake, a vibrant and committed young preacher, brings his beloved wife, Willadee Moses, and their three children back for the festivities.

Blackboard best-selling author Bertice Berry breaks all the rules of romantic comedy with this funny, sexy novel about an older couple rediscovering their passion for living and loving. Jim and Louella's love life has gone a bit chilly after 26 years of marriage. But then Louella's ancestors visit her dreams, and a sexual reawakening quickly follows. Soon after, Jim and Louella realize they can read the thoughts of other people, so they begin a quest to heal the community around them.

Seven years ago, orphaned and alone, Em finally arrived at a new home in Iowa after riding the orphan train. But secrets from her past haunt her, and her new life in the Western wilderness is a rough one. When her guardian is shot and killed, Em, now 19, finally has the chance to search for her long-lost sister, but she won't be able to do it alone.

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.

As the year 1928 begins, 14-year-old Lanie Belle Freeman of Fairhope, Arkansas, has bright hopes for the future. Her father has launched a new business, and her mother is expecting her fifth baby. Lanie has dreams of going to college and being a writer. Then tragedy strikes.

In frontier Montana, Cassidy is a busy seamstress with a hidden history, but her desire for a family would force her to reveal the details of her life. Will she find the strength to take that risk?

Newly widowed Amish woman Anita Graber has returned to live with her brother and his family in Lancaster County. As an expectant widow, she is quite surprised when everyone from the bishop's wife to her brother decides that her baby needs a father. Anita endures many embarrassing moments as she's forced into one awkward situation after another. Even though another man is the last thing on her mind, she finds a friend in her sister-in-law's brother, Simon.

The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around fast. If the preacher's wife's petticoat shows, the ladies will make the talk last a week. But on July 5, 1906, things take a scandalous turn. That is the day E. Rucker Blakeslee, proprietor of the general store and barely three weeks a widower, elopes with Miss Love Simpson, a woman half his age and, worse yet, a Yankee!

The author tells the story as told to him of Anne Hobbs, a woman who went to Alaska in the 1920s to teach, but who had trouble due to her kindness to the Indians there.

Only a few nuclear weapons fell. But in the chaos of famine and plague, there existed a few pockets of order. The strongest of them was the state of Deseret. The climate has changed, and the lake has filled up. There, on the fringes, brave, hardworking pioneers are making the desert bloom again.

On a farm in western Missouri, during the first half of the twentieth century, Matthew and Callie Soames create a life for themselves and raise four headstrong daughters. Jessica will break their hearts. Leonie will fall in love with the wrong man. Mary Jo will escape to New York. And wild child Mathy’s fate will be the family’s greatest tragedy. Over the decades they will love, deceive, comfort, forgive - and, ultimately, they will come to cherish all the more fiercely the bonds of love that hold the family together.

Ethan McOwen is an Irish immigrant whose endurance is tested in Brooklyn and the Five Points at the height of its urban destitution; he is among the first to join the famed Irish Brigade and becomes a celebrated war photographer. Marcella, a society girl from Spain, defies her father to become a passionate abolitionist. Mary and Micah are slaves of varying circumstances, who form an instant connection and embark on a tumultuous path to freedom. All four lives unfold in two beautiful love stories, which eventually collide.

Eleven-year-old Sallie March is a whip-smart tomboy and voracious reader of Western adventure novels. When she and her sister, Maude, are orphaned for the second time, they decide to escape their new self-serving guardians for the wilds of the frontier and an adventure the likes of which Sallie has only read about. This time, however, the wanted woman isn't a villain out of a dime novel: it's Sallie's very own sister!

Among the longleaf pines and family farms of eastern North Carolina, days seem to pass without incident for Margaret Clayton and Bernice Stokes until they discover each other in a friendship that will take them on the most important journey of their lives. Margaret, droll and whip smart, has a will of iron that never fails her even when her body does, while Bernice, an avid country-music fan, is rarely lucid.

Near the end of her life, Mary Mann Hamilton (1866-c.1936) was encouraged to record her experiences as a female pioneer. The result is the only known firsthand account of a remarkable woman thrust into the center of taming the American South - surviving floods, tornadoes, and fires; facing bears, panthers, and snakes; managing a boardinghouse in Arkansas that was home to an eccentric group of settlers; and running a logging camp in Mississippi that blazed a trail for development in the Mississippi Delta.

It is 1936 and Kate Merritt works hard to keep her family together. Her father has slipped into alcoholism, her mother is trying to come to grips with their dire financial situation, and her sisters seem to remain blissfully oblivious to all of it. Kate could never have imagined that a dirty, abandoned little girl named Lorena Birdsong would be just what her family needs.