In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, "old same," in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she's painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower...

During the 1929 depression, four teenage girls write their dreams for the future on slips of paper and place them in a bottle. Sixty-five years later when a reporter comes across them, she traces the whereabouts of the women. She finds that though their dreams may not have been fulfilled, they met life's difficulties with great courage.

In 1838, Arabella Godwin and her brother, Lewis, are orphaned and sent to live on their aunt's desolate farm in upstate New York. Time and again she will be broken and remade. She will bear a gambler's child, build a fortune, commit murder, leave a trail of aliases in her wake and sacrifice almost everything for the man whose love she cannot bear to lose. Her destiny takes her to Gold Rush California... where she disappears.

An old man reminisces about his first love, a young runaway who taught him more about life than anyone had before or since.

If you had to pick five people to sum up your life, who would they be? If you were to raise a glass to each of them, what would you say? And what would you learn about yourself, when all is said? At the bar of a grand hotel in a small Irish town sits 84-year-old Maurice Hannigan. He's alone, as usual, though tonight is anything but. Pull up a stool and charge your glass, because Maurice is finally ready to tell his story. Over the course of this evening,...

Pensive in the wake of 9/11, a young man launches a mission to reunite his beloved grandfather, an American bombardier, with Luddie, the woman who saved him during WWII. Armed only with the address on the back of an old photograph and his grandfather's memories, the young man begins writing letters to Luddie. Undaunted by her lack of response, the narrator travels to Poland with his girlfriend and grandfather. As they come closer to finding the site...

A tale set in the 1970s American South shares the story of Lovie Rutledge, who reflects on a summer during which a beach vacation to escape her unfaithful, disdainful husband culminates in a fateful romance with a handsome biologist.

"In the black-owned-and-operated Kirkwood Hospital, Joseph 'Ziggy' Johnson reflects on his life. From the Great Depression through the post-World War II years, Ziggy had been the pulse of Detroit's famous Black Bottom. A celebrated gossip columnist for the city's African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, he was also the emcee of one of the hottest night clubs, where he rubbed elbows with the legendary black artists of the era. In his hospital...

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband, David, has left her, and her career has stagnated. Regardless of why Evelyn has chosen her to write...