An opportunistic Southern lawyer compromises his ideals and exploits people to gain fame, only to be destroyed when he goes one step too far, becoming involved in bank fraud. By the author of Legacy of Silence.

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.

The owner of a New England glassworks company, widow Cassie Wright struggles to raise her surviving child, Gwen, in the face of unbearable tragedy, but as Gwen blossoms into an independent young woman, dissention drives the two apart, until Gwen has her own child, a little girl who reunites the estranged family.

Adam Arnring, son of an Irish immigrant and a Jewish peddler, heads West and lays the foundations of what will become one of the country's greatest retail companies. But along the way, love and war intervene, testing the ties that bind him to his brothers and to his trusting wife.