Her finances are in dire straits and bestselling author Sarah Blake is struggling to find a big idea for her next book. Desperate, she breaks the one promise she made to her Alzheimer’s-stricken mother and opens an old chest that belonged to her great-grandfather, who died when the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-Boat in 1915. What she discovers there could change history. Sarah embarks on an ambitious journey to England to enlist the help of John Langford, a recently disgraced Member of Parliament whose family archives might contain the only key to the long-ago catastrophe.

In the summer of 1951, Miranda Schuyler arrives on elite, secretive Winthrop Island, still reeling from the loss of her father in the Second World War. When her beautiful mother marries Hugh Fisher, Miranda is catapulted into a heady new world of pedigrees and cocktails, status and swimming pools. Isobel Fisher, Miranda’s new stepsister, is eager to draw Miranda into the arcane customs of Winthrop society. Uneasy among Isobel’s privileged friends, she finds herself drawn to Joseph Vargas, who has enjoyed an intense, complex friendship with Isobel. As the summer winds to its end, Miranda is caught in a catastrophe that will shatter Winthrop’s hard-won tranquility and banish her from the island for nearly two decades.

Burdened by a dark family secret, Virginia Fortescue flees her oppressive home in New York City for the battlefields of World War I France. As the war rages, Virginia falls into a passionate affair with the dashing Captain Simon Fitzwilliam, only to discover that his past has its own dark secrets --- secrets that will damage their eventual marriage. Five years later, the newly widowed Virginia Fitzwilliam arrives in Cocoa Beach, Florida, to settle her husband’s estate. Despite the evidence, Virginia does not believe Simon perished in the fire that destroyed the seaside home he built for her and their young daughter. Separated from her husband since the early days of their marriage, the headstrong Virginia plans to uncover the truth, for the sake of the daughter Simon never met.

When she discovers that her banker husband has been harboring a secret life, Ella Gilbert escapes their sleek SoHo loft for a studio in a quaint building in Greenwich Village. Her charismatic musician neighbor, Hector, warns her to stay out of the basement after midnight, when a symphony of mysterious noise strikes up, even though it's stood empty for decades. Back in the Roaring Twenties, the building hosted one of the city’s most notorious speakeasies. As Ella unravels the strange history of the building --- and the family thread that connects her to flapper Geneva Kelly --- she senses the Jazz Age spirit of her incandescent predecessor invading her own shy nature, in ways that will transform her life in the wicked city.

As the freedom of the Jazz Age transforms New York City, the iridescent Mrs. Theresa Marshall has done the unthinkable: she’s fallen in love with her young paramour, Captain Octavian Rofrano, a handsome aviator and hero of the Great War. While times are changing and she does adore the Boy, divorce for a woman of Theresa’s wealth and social standing is out of the question, and there is no need; she has an understanding with Sylvo, her generous and well-respected philanderer husband. But their relationship subtly shifts when her bachelor brother, Ox, decides to tie the knot with the sweet younger daughter of a newly wealthy inventor.

When the critically wounded Captain Cooper Ravenal is brought to a private hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 1945, young Dr. Kate Schuyler is drawn into a complex mystery that connects three generations of women in her family to a single extraordinary room in a Gilded Age mansion. Who is the woman in Captain Ravenel's portrait miniature who looks so much like Kate? And why is she wearing the ruby pendant handed down to Kate by her mother?

To find a way to take care of herself and the baby she carries, Pepper Schuyler fixes up a beautiful and rare vintage Mercedes and sells it at auction. But the car's new owner, the glamorous Annabelle Dommerich, has her own secrets: a Nazi husband, a Jewish lover, a flight from Europe, and a love so profound it transcends decades. As the many threads of Annabelle's life before the Second World War stretch out to entangle Pepper in 1960s America, and the father of her unborn baby tracks her down, the two women must come together to face down the shadows of their complicated pasts.

November 11, 1918. In the aftermath of World War I, soldiers, loved ones and survivors await the years ahead with hope, even as their hearts are marked by all those who have been lost. As families come back together, lovers reunite and strangers take solace in each other, everyone has a story to tell.

In the summer of 1966, Christina Hardcastle (“Tiny” to her illustrious family) stands on the brink of a breathtaking future. Together she and her husband, Frank, make the ultimate power couple. But as the season gets underway at the family estate on Cape Cod, three unwelcome visitors appear in Tiny’s perfect life: her volatile sister, Pepper; an envelope containing an incriminating photograph; and the intimidating figure of Frank’s cousin, Vietnam war hero Caspian, who knows more about Tiny’s rich inner life than anyone else.

Vivian Schuyler has recently defied the privilege of her storied old Fifth Avenue family to do the unthinkable for a budding Kennedy-era socialite: break into the Madison Avenue world of razor-stylish Metropolitan magazine. But when she receives a bulky overseas parcel in the mail, the unexpected contents draw her inexorably back into her family’s past, and the hushed-over crime passionnel of an aunt she never knew, whose existence has been wiped from the record of history.

Nick and Budgie Greenwald are an unwelcome specter from New York socialite Lily Dane’s past: her former best friend and her former fiancé, now recently married. Budgie’s arrival to restore her family’s old house puts her once more in the center of the community’s social scene. The ties that bind Lily to Nick are too strong and intricate to ignore, and the two are drawn back into long-buried dreams, despite their uneasy secrets and many emotional obligations.

A young Wall Street analyst, Kate Wilson learned to rely on logic and cynicism. So why does she fall so desperately in love with Julian Laurence, a billionaire with a mysterious past? What she doesn't know is that he has been waiting for her...the enchanting woman who emerged from the shadows of the Great War to save his life.