Trygve Knutson has been promoted from well drilling to heading a construction crew for the fast growing town of Blessing, North Dakota. Though devoted to the land and his family, he sometimes dreams of other horizons. But is he willing to leave Blessing permanently? Miriam Francini hopes to become an accredited nurse in a large city hospital. She is simply tolerating her assignment at the hospital in rural Blessing because it will give her the experience she needs to accomplish her goal.

Larkspur Nielsen is ready for a change. Her parents have passed on, and her older brother is successfully running the family business. She bristles at the small-mindedness that permeates life in her small Ohio community, and she sees little chance of a satisfying future there. She has a little money saved, and after turning the tables on a crooked gambler who had fleeced several locals, including her younger brother, she can stake a new start for herself and her three sisters. 

After three long years of scrimping and saving to buy tickets for their passage to America, Roald and Ingeborg Bjorklund, along with their son, Thorliff, finally arrive at the docks of New York City. It was the promise of free land that fed their dream and lured them from their beloved home high above the fjords of Norway in 1880. As they join the throngs of countless immigrants passing through Castle Garden, the Bjorklunds soon discover that nothing is as they had envisioned it.

Ellie Wold can't wait to graduate from high school. She and Andrew Bjorklund have been waiting to get married since...well, since forever, and in June they will finally wed. When Andrew announces they have to postpone the wedding, she's disappointed but takes it in stride--there must be a good reason, or Andrew's pa wouldn't ask it of them.

Award-winning author Lauraine Snelling delivers her first installment of the Dakotah Treasures series. Ruby, a Crossings Book Club Main Selection, is the story of a young woman who must leave behind the life she has grown accustomed to in order to start a new life in the bleak Dakota Territory.

Thorliff's dream of becoming a writer is within reach. Working for a newspaper in Northfield, Minnesota, he is busy writing articles and stories to pay his way through college. But his idyllic world comes to a sudden halt when a catastrophe hits the town of Blessing, North Dakota. While waiting to hear if any of her applications to medical schools are accepted, Elizabeth takes a nursing position in Chicago. Then a devastating experience on the hospital ward puts her faith in God and her very life on the line. 

Seeking to fulfill the promise she made to her dying father, 18-year-old Jesselynn Highwood determines to take her little brother and the family's remaining thoroughbreds from the Twin Oaks plantation in Kentucky to her uncle's farm in Missouri, where they will be safe for the remainder of the Civil War.

It is 1893, and the first generation of immigrants who came to America for the promise of free land and a good life for their children have finally achieved their dreams. They labored hard on the land and now have a bountiful heritage to pass on to the next generation. However, many of the young people aren't interested in becoming farmers - they have aspirations of their own. Thorliff Bjorklund has been writing stories and plays since he was a young boy and longs to attend college to study journalism. But his father has other plans for him and refuses to agree.  

Addie Bryant is haunted by her past of heartbreak and betrayal. After her beau, Isaac Hanson, left the Yukon, she made a vow to wait for him. When she's sold to a brothel owner after the death of her father, Addie manages to escape with the hope that she can forever hide her past and the belief that she will never have the future she's always dreamed of. Years later, Addie has found peace in her new life as a photographer, training Camera Girls to operate and sell the Brownie camera. But during the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Expo in Seattle, Addie is reunited with Isaac.

Jericho Coulter, the eldest of six fiercely devoted brothers, is entrusted with safeguarding his family and the secret that binds them together: the Sapphire mine. To keep tragedy from striking again, he allows no outsiders on their land. When two women stumble upon their ranch, claiming Jericho himself sent for one of them as a mail-order bride, he aims to send them straight back where they came from.

Invited by a friend to trek west and help establish the newly formed town of Cheyenne, Edward Vogel is prepared to leave the haunting memories of his wife and son’s deaths behind him. The only problem is the corrupt new railroad town wants family men who can establish law and order, and desperation leads Edward to his friend Marybeth with a proposition of marriage.

Kat Wadsworth and Sebastian Jones never imagined their lives would entwine so closely. Forced to flee on a wagon train from a vengeful uncle and an unknown gunman, they live in a hidden canyon with the family that rescued them. But as days turn into months, they each have separate reasons for wanting to escape back to society, and the best way to the independence they desperately crave might be through a marriage of convenience.

Portland, Oregon, 1879. Nancy Pritchard finds herself a widow with a world of problems when her deceased husband's schemes start to come to light. As she searches through the pieces of her loveless marriage, Nancy realizes there is a lot that she didn't know about this man. Seth Carpenter is a childhood friend of Nancy's who has recently returned to Portland. He's delighted to see her again, and as a lawyer, he is able to help her sort through the legal aspects of her husband's death. 

Faith Kenner is pursuing her dream to become a doctor at Willamette University's medical college so she can use her gift for healing to help those in need, especially the native populations forced onto reservations and then neglected. When she meets Andrew Gratton, a handsome riverboat captain who has been injured on his ship, she uses her skills to tend his wound, and a friendship grows between them. But Faith holds a secret that means their friendship can never become anything more, so she must bury her feelings for Andrew as best she can. 

Upon uncovering her tyrannical father’s malevolent plot to commit her to an asylum, Beth Rutledge fabricates a plan of her own. She will rescue her mother, who had already been sent to the asylum, and escape together on a wagon train heading west. Posing as sisters, Beth and her mother travel with the pioneers in hopes of making it to Idaho before the others start asking too many questions.