Though Iris Stern considers herself a modern woman, with a successful academic career and a happy marriage, she still holds steadfast to her old-fashioned sensibilities. But as the mother of three adult children, each with their own lives and burdens to bear, she often finds those sensibilities called into question when confronted with the choices her children have made. Through separations and reunions, the changes we cannot avoid and the love that sustains, Iris will weather whatever lies ahead with a faith that cannot be shaken. 

This is a love story of great beauty and great tenderness, the kind of love story that entangles the listener in the lives of the characters, so that after the story is over, one continues to live with those characters. And fortunately, the listener will not have to say farewell to these characters, since it is the first in a series that will tell the story of three Californian families over the course of the 20th century.

The inspiring story of Max Britsky, who grew up in the slums of New York and became one of the most powerful men in the American movie industry. Max tells the story of the rise of Max Britsky, entwined with the film industry’s beginnings near the turn of the twentieth century. When he was twelve, Max's father died, leaving him to scrape out a living in Manhattan's Lower East Side slums to provide for his mother and siblings. But Max was a natural entrepreneur, and he followed his business instincts and love of the theater to become one of the first film moguls in the history of American moviemaking.

I never expected to have to uproot my family to go live in my parents’ isolated cottage on Lost Lake. It’s twenty miles to the nearest town, an insignificant speck in endless pine forests. Nobody’s lived here for a decade. Now, I pick up a rusty pail from its nest of autumn leaves and turn to my daughter. Suddenly, I recall how I used to help my own mother pick wild strawberries up here as a little girl. Maybe, this isn’t a punishment. Maybe this place will be the making of our family.

1897. Rosamund bows her head and steps slowly down the aisle. The satin of her gown whispers against the stone floor and a single tear falls into the bunch of yellow roses twisted in her trembling hands. Despite rumors of his cruelty, Rosamund has no choice but to become this man’s second wife. After her wedding, Rosamund finds herself trapped in Sir Lucien Fitznorton’s lonely country estate. As she wanders the chilly halls, made shadowy by drapes of heavy velvet, she longs for the lost comforts of her childhood home, where she was the beloved only daughter to a doting father.

After her recent divorce, the last thing Diane "Andy" Calhoun wants is another relationship. But then she meets Tom Dabney, a strong and sensitive man who focuses on protecting the wilderness. Andy can't help falling in love with this committed environmentalist who lives alone in the woods. Their passionate affair inspires Andy, as does Tom's battle to stop the building of a nuclear arms plant, but as time marches on, she must decide whether to spend her life with the man she has come to love.

Coolly sophisticated and steadfastly single, Caroline Renwick has always been the sister everyone could count on. As she and Clea and Skye gathered at Firefly Hill, their childhood home, Caroline thought that they had all put the past behind them. But as summer gets under way, a mysterious man arrives—a man who has the power to bring it all back....

Jennifer Parker, a brilliant and beautiful young lawyer, survives shattering career setbacks to become one of the most successful defense attorneys in America. Jennifer's strength and beauty win the love of 2 powerful men, but earn her the implacable hatred of a third. Adam Warner, man of integrity, born to lead his country, is tied by honor and obligation to his wife. Michael Moretti, compelling Mafia boss, nearly destroys Jennifer's career before it begins.

In Paris, in Washington, and in Greece in a fabulous villa, an innocent American becomes a bewildered, horror-stricken pawn in a game of vengeance and betrayal. She is Catherine Douglas, a woman caught in a web of four lives intertwined by passion as her handsome husband pursues an incredibly beautiful film star...and as Constantin Demeris, a legendary Greek tycoon, tightens the strands that control them all.

At 12, Emily Parmenter is left mostly to herself after her mother disappears and her beloved older brother dies. Emily has built a life around the faded plantation where her remote father and hunting-obsessed brothers raise hunting spaniels. It is a meager, masculine world, but to Emily it has magic. And then comes Lulu Foxworth, troubled daughter of a truly grand plantation, who has run away from her hectic Charleston debutante season.