For a thousand years her existence has been denied. She is the legend that will not diePope Joan, the ninth-century woman who disguised herself as a man and rose to become the only female ever to sit on the throne of St. Peter. Brilliant and talented, young Joan rebels against medieval social strictures forbidding women to learn. When her brother is brutally killed during a Viking attack, Joan takes up his cloakand his identityand...

Ruth Young and her widowed mother, LuLing, have always had a tumultuous relationship. Now, before she succumbs to forgetfulness, LuLing gives Ruth some of her writings, which reveal a side of LuLing that Ruth has never known... In a remote mountain village where ghosts and tradition rule, LuLing grows up in the care of her mute Precious Auntie as the family endures a curse laid upon a relative known as the bonesetter. When headstrong LuLing rejects...

This group of former coeds, who once traveled down the Mississippi on a raft of their own construction, reunite to make the same trip on a fancy steamboat to scatter the ashes of one departed member. Along the way, we learn the stories of the unmarried Harriet, wealthy romance writer and once-poor West Virginia girl Anna, straying society wife Courtney, and Catherine and husband Russell. Each has had troubles and romances, and as they trace their...